First a little background. When I decided to upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, I figured I'd do a fresh install this time. Most of the prior upgrades went without a hitch, at least until the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04. With that upgrade my audio became an unreliable thing. Sometimes it would work, frequently it didn't without some level of monkeying around by me. So, when I decided to upgrade to 8.10, I figured a clean install would be my best path.
Now as a general rule, I never jump on an upgrade as soon as it comes out. There always seems to be a number of things wrong with it, for whatever reason. So I always wait a couple of months before I go ahead with the upgrade. Well, the fresh install went without a hitch. I had moved all of the important stuff off to a secondary drive and was able to restore most things without too much difficulty. All of this was done within the last couple of weeks.
Enough background junk. The reason I'm posting all of this, is mainly as a place for me to keep track of what I had to do to get my Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT video card to play nice with Kubuntu 8.10. An exercise that I had to repeat just recently because of an update early last week.
First, I would recommend that you go to the Nvidia Driver Downloads and grab the latest driver from Nvidia. I know that the Ubuntu team offers up Nvidia drivers, but they are not the latest and in my experience they never fix the little issue of actually being able to work. For me they do nothing but cause the X-Server to crash repeatedly. Once you've entered information, Nvidia will require you to agree to their TOS and then you get to download your nifty new driver. Once that is in hand, or on your hard drive, log out. You don't need to reboot at this point, just log out.
Next, at the log in screen, select a console login from the menu selection at the bottom of the screen (you'll find it between the session type and the date/time). You're doing this, because it's the easiest path that I found to get this done.
Now that you're at the console go ahead and log in with your normal information (username and password). Note, if you don't do something quickly enough, it'll return to the graphical login and you'll have to do again. Once you are logged in, navigate to where you saved the driver download from the Nvidia website (in other words, use things like cd and ls). When you have found your way to the file, you'll need to enter something like this: sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.22-pkg1.run to run the script. Follow along with the instructions that it gives, they're actually pretty straight forward and clear.
When all of that is done, just type in exit and the X-Server should restart. If it doesn't, then you'll need to reboot the machine (sudo shutdown -r now). Once X-Server has restarted, just login like you would normally. Now you should be able to make use of any nifty graphical features that you couldn't get to work before.
If you are wanting to get into something like twinview because you've got yourself two monitors, then you'll need to open konsole (a terminal window) and enter the following string: sudo nvidia-settings to launch the Nvidia settings prog. Once it is up, you can make the changes that you need (or desire) to your setup. Two words of advice here. One, don't forget to tell it which monitor is the default or primary monitor. Second, don't use apply, just save your changes to the xorg.conf file and reboot. Theoretically you should be able to just reboot the x-server, but I always prefer a clean reboot at this point. Mainly just to make sure that there are no potential funkiness .
There we go. Nice simple and easy. I know there are other tutorials out there, but this one is mine.
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