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RPiAwesomeness
Asked: 2014-12-17 15:03:02 +0800 CST

Fresh Ubuntu 14.04.1 Install - No Additional Drivers Available?

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I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 on my brand new, self-built, desktop PC. It has an i5-4690k, 8GB DDR3-1600MHz, and an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti FTW:

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I have pretty abysmal frame-rates on everything (Hammerwatch & Minecraft currently), so I figured I'd look into getting the proprietary drivers, which I was told are supposed to improve FPS quite a bit.

However, when I go to Software & Updates > Additional Drivers I get nothing:

wut

I noticed on this question here (describes my issue almost exactly the same) that I might have to add the xorg-edgers PPA for them to show up. However, I was under the impression that the X-SWAT & Xorg-edgers PPAs were dangerous for system stability.

Is this the case, or do I have to add one or the other of these PPAs to get the drivers?

As a side note, I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu is, indeed, using my GTX 750 Ti, as the output of lspci -vnnn | perl -lne 'print if /^\d+\:.+(\[\S+\:\S+\])/' | grep VGA returns this:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] [10de:1380] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

EDIT:

It would appear that this is actually a fairly common bug, just from my googling about.

Here's a Launchpad bug report that describes it perfectly. They mention that adding the xorg-edgers PPA and installing the nvidia-340 drivers resolves this issue.

However, I'm still a tad nervous about enabling a testing repository - is it safe enough to enable the repository, install the driver, and then disable the repository?

drivers

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I ended up downloading the newest drivers straight from NVIDIA from here and installing them manually. Obviously, this won't automatically update in the future (AFAIK).

    The path I had to take was actually quite convoluted, involving adding the nomodeset flag to GRUB, then killing lightdm, and then running the installer. I followed some suggestions from here and was provided some help from @Mateo and @Seth in chat.

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