Updating 3.0 Kernel and Official Nvidia Driver on Ubuntu Lucid

Ubuntu Lucid(10.04) originally ships with 2.6.32 kernel. But on my T420 thinkpad, the wireless card is not recognized and graphics card is not functional well. Then I switched to 2.6.38 backport kernel, and installed bumblebee package to utilize the Nvidia Optimus Technology. Now the 3.0.0-16 backport kernel is out, it contains the fix for “rework ASPM disable code”, and it should do a better job in power saving even using the discrete Nvidia card. Moreover, it’s the new LTS kernel, so I decided to update to the 3.0 kernel. Please follow the steps if you are interested:

1. Add X-Updates PPA

These commands install official nvidia driver. Currently, it’s the 295.20 version.

2. Enable Nvidia Driver

This will let you to choose opengl engines. Select nvidia over mesa. This will also enable nvidia Xorg drivers, blacklist nouveau driver and add nvidia-xconfig into /usr/bin. You may find warnings like:

Just ignore them, seems to be safe.

This will generate new /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for your Nvidia card. If you cannot find the command, the original location is: /usr/lib/nvidia-current/bin/nvidia-xconfig

3. Fix ld Bindings

This just add an ld path into /etc/ld.so.conf.d/GL.conf, otherwise, glx module cannot be loaded correctly. Here’s the /etc/log/Xorg.0.log segments:

Now, update ld runtime bindings and reboot.

4. Verify

If your installation is successful, the output looks like:

After installing the driver, hedgewars shows 120fps. While it used to show 4fps. It’s a great improvement. 🙂

hedgewars

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