Ubuntu 8.04 - nvidia driver problems
I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 1520, along with a spinky GeForce 8600 GT Mobile graphics chip.
Dell sell some of their systems with Ubuntu installed on them, and I quite fancy giving it a try, so I slapped on the latest version of Ubuntu - 8.04.
The installation was very quick and painless, I slotted it in between my existing Windows, Swap and Data partitions on the disk (hopefully not wiping out my existing data as I had with Linux a year or so ago).
Everything works fine, including all the special/media buttons on the laptop, such as screen brightness, battery status etc.
The only problem was the graphics. Although the resolution was up to the expected, the colour depth wasn't and the interface was sluggish. This seemed fairly obvious to me that there was no drivers for my card.
A little exploration found the "Hardware Drivers" section which listed a non-open-source nvidia driver as enabled but marked in red as "not-used". This is was due to a missing package.
In order to fix this, the package called "nvidia-glx-new" needs to be installed. This can be done from "Synaptic Package Manager"; but the extra Third Party Software repository has to be included before it will be picked up. This will also provide you with a bundle of updates and patches - it seems.
Everything is working wonderfully now. Very impressive OS so far - probably better than Vista. I'll have to see if it's better than Windows XP.