How to install proprietary NVIDIA drivers

NVIDIA has been the target of many attacks by the community of the FOSS, and all of us who closely follow the news of our favorite operating system will remember the expletives that Linus Torvalds himself directed at him at the time. Nobody disputes whether both in that case and in others were well founded or not, the truth is that luckily for those who prefer to have as much free software as possible there is the option of using the drivers New.

These, as we well know, have improved a lot, but sometimes unfortunately it is necessary to resort to the official drivers for reasons of that extra performance margin that they can offer us. So, in this post we are going to see how to install proprietary NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu, for which first of all we are going to verify which is the graphic card model that we have in our system.

We open a terminal window (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute:

lspci | grep vga

After which we should see something like:

02: 00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 240] (rev a2)

In my case, the graphics card that my computer has is the NVIDIA GeForce GT 240. Perfect, then we are going to install the linux-headers-generic package, which will install the header files of the kernel version that we have installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic

Once that is done, we go to the NVIDIA download page, which is located at http://www.nvidia.es/Download/index.aspx?lang=es, and there we select the driver for our card. In my case, with the information obtained before, I am looking through the options; I would have something like what you see in the upper image of this post and once I have that I click on 'Search', after which we will finally have access to the page from which we can download the drivers for our card.

Once we have the drivers on our computer we go to the download folder and execute it, the file is something of the type 'NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.76.run'. It is a script type file and the part that says '-340.76' will vary according to the type of version. Well, we must execute that script but for this we have to give it execution permission:

sudo chmod +755 NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.76.run

Now we are going to add the Nouveau driver to the Blacklist of kernel modules, to prevent it from loading at system startup:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

And we add at the end of the file the line:

blacklist new

Next, what we will need is to uninstall all the graphics driver packages that came with our Ubuntu installation. For this we execute:

sudo apt-get remove –purge nvidia *

sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

Now we open a new console window (Ctrl + Alt + F2), we log in and enter the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop

With this we finish the graphical environment, and once we have done it we restart the computer:

sudo reboot

This time, when the system starts we will receive a notice that will alert us that Ubuntu is running in low resolution mode, which we must accept. Then, we will receive several alternatives to boot, and what we have to do is select the one that says "Start a session in console mode". We return to a login like the one we saw in the previous step, and this time after entering our data we are going to execute the installation script of the NVIDIA drivers:

sudo sh nvidia-linux-x86_64-340.76.run

The installation begins to run, and the most practical and safe thing to do is to click on "Yes, I accept" to all of them, and at the end we restart the graphical environment:

sudo service lightdm start

Now we can log in to the graphical environment, the only thing left is to run the "NVIDIA Server Configuration Settings" tool, where in the NVIDIA X Server Settings or X Server Display Configuration option we are going to save the configuration to a file , by clicking on «Save to X Configuration File». That's it, now we will be ready and using the best NVIDIA options for our system.