Installing NVidia & ATI graphic drivers in Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

For those who have used the previous versions, you might have found the driver installation easy with your driver being mentioned under the restricted drivers section(System->Administration->Restricted Drivers/Hardware Drivers). In Hardy Heron, I found a small problem in installing the nvidia drivers in my brother's PC. He has been using ubuntu from 5.10 and is a great fan of the XGL stuffs. I then searched for other stuffs and found Envy here.

It's a great product and I installed it and restarted the X server only to find that my X server was still not detecting my GeForce FX 5200 graphic card. Then I did some googling and some strange commands wit my OS. Then I found something out of my own interest. If you guys notice very carefully, the restricted-manager has been replaced with jockey-gtk in 8.04. I tried running it from the terminal and I noticed a strange error, before it came up on the screen.

sudo jockey-gtk

I got a list of four modinfo errors to be precise, saying files were not found. The files were:-

/lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/fglrx.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/nvidia.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/nvidia_legacy.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/nvidia_new.ko

These files are not only necessary for the jockey to reflect the Graphic card but also by the Xserver to correctly load the Graphic driver. After careful study and my confidence to experiment, I decided to re-install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-16-generic that comes with the Hardy Heron CD. I thought that the files might be available in the repository as they might have added it after the CD release.
Note:- For this, right click on the already installed and select mark for re-installation under Synaptic Package Manager.


After reinstalling the L-R-M, I found that I got the mising files in the respective directory. Then all I had to do was just go to the terminal and run the jockey-gtk again. It correctly detected my card and Bingo, I had Compiz running in no time.



You can also install the Nvidia driver using Envy after re-installing the L-R-M. It provides with higher options than normal. Envy is capable of loading the new drivers automatically from the nvidia or the ATI site. It can automatically overwrite the drivers installed by ubuntu by default.

All the Best !!!!!!!!! for the new ubuntu installation.

Note:- I installed from the CD, I got from ubuntu site. The new CD image in the site might be already fixed.