Install ATI and Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu (the painless way)

I’ll admit. Ubuntu is a great OS but it has its quirks. One of this is installing graphics drivers. Its not really Ubuntu’s fault but the hardware manufacturer’s fault. You see, a majority of graphics card makers don’t bother making drivers in linux distros for the sheer reason that only a minority of the market eat linux. They kiss Microsoft’s ass all the time (shame on you). Luckily, there are linux “heroes” in this planet earth that seem to care. They painstakingly reverse engineer, look at a defunct documentation (if there are any) and try their best to make drivers for linux users benefit.

Now, my main problem for months now is getting this Geforce 5200 card of mine to work on Ubuntu. Ive tried the restricted drivers. Failed. Every darn drivers in ubuntu repositories. Failed. Finally got the drivers to work but enabling the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver got me in a roadblock. It will work but only on 800×600. Now that sucks! I could run the compiz effects but its pretty much useless. I needed higher resolution. So I stuck in Ubuntu’s default effect which is nothing.

Months went by and I tried again. Failed. Again and again and failed. Ubuntu should deal with this in Intrepid or later releases because looking at the forums with this topics, all I can see are disgruntled users. Same as me. There are “hard-core” hacks but I’m too lazy to edit my x config. Come on, seriously, do you really thing “everybody” would have the time to learn “everything” in order to do things? I mean, its good but we have to admit that we could not be good at everything all the time. Sometimes, it pays to just have a GUI configuration that we could click and focus on what we are good at.

Anyways, where was I? Ok ok, so with that mindset, I can across this Envy thing written by Alberto Milone. Installed it and viola, it detected my GeForce driver like a walk in the park. No bullshit! Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Here’s what I did:

1. Just sudo this up in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk

2. The look it up in Applications -> System Tools -> EnvyNG

is this painless or what?

3. From there, its a no-brainer. That’s it! There is a saying “There are many ways to skin a cat”, and ill be damned this is the easiest way to skin. >:)

P.S. This only works on ATI and Nvidia cards.