Ubuntu Graphics Driver
- Ubuntu Graphics Driver Nvidia
- Ubuntu Graphics Drivers Update
- Ubuntu Intel Graphics Driver
- Ubuntu Nvidia Graphics Driver
- Ubuntu Graphics Driver Ppa
Nvidia drivers. If you have an Nvidia graphics card on your system, then its recommended to install the official drivers provided by Nvidia. The proprietory drivers would utilise the hardware properly delivering full performance. Despite its name, the PPA only provides proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers updates, with no support for AMD or Intel. Even though the PPA is probably the most stable way of upgrading to the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers version in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, it's still considered in testing. For Ubuntu laptops with dual graphics cards, Intel graphics is being used by default. To get the best graphics performance for playing games or charting, you need to manually switch to NVIDIA graphics card.
Duplicate Article |
How to Install Nvidia Graphics Driver on Ubuntu 18.04 From Graphical User Interface. First, go to system settings > details and check what graphics card your computer is using. By default, your integrated graphics card (Intel HD Graphics) is being used. Stack Exchange Network. Stack Exchange network consists of 174 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. The state of installing newer graphics drivers for AMD and Nvidia cards on Ubuntu is a mixed bag. While it's undeniably faster than Windows, it's not intuitive for new users who need bleeding edge.
Contents
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Video Card Driver Types
- This guide and its subpages describe the driver situation in ubuntu and how to install proprietary binary/restricted drivers where open source drivers are not available.
Please note There are two types of drivers that we can use: Open Source and Proprietary drivers. Open Source drivers have been created by the Linux community to function with certain video cards, and most video cards have an Open Source driver available. In addition, older hardware is typically better supported by Open Source drivers. In some cases, there is no proprietary driver for the graphics card (such as non-HD Radeons) and installing such a driver will only prevent the Open Source driver from functioning correctly.
- These types of drivers are usually licensed with the GPL and we can use these drivers freely. The advantages of using the Open Source drivers are that they are community supported and bugs can be fixed by the community programmers.
- The disadvantages are that the Open Source drivers sometimes do not provide full support for all of the video card's features. This is changing however, with the advent of gallium implementations.
If you encounter bugs with these closed-source drivers, developers will not be able or even willing to assist you in resolving your issues. Use at your own risk.
To determine your video card make and model, run this command from terminal:
More detailed information can be found by running
For a list of supported video cards, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCards.
Basic Installation Instructions
The easiest way to install binary drivers is to use the built in Hardware Drivers manager in Ubuntu.
In Ubuntu 10.04 and 9:10 this is found under System->Administration->Hardware Drivers.
Note:In Ubuntu 10:10 Hardware Drivers is now named Additional Drivers
More Detailed Installation Instructions
Here are some useful links and related pages.
- Drivers
BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
BinaryDriverHowto/MatroxParhelia
BinaryDriverHowto/EiconDiva
Ubuntu ATI Open Source Driver Howto
OpenChrome
BinaryDriverHowto/VIA
BinaryDriverHowto/Sis
Help!
Ubuntu Forums - Ask your questions here.
BinaryDriverHowto/DynamicMultiMonitor - How to dynamically set multiple monitor resolution.
If you have a Matrox based video card, you can also try the pages at the Unofficial Matrox Technical Support Forum
NvidiaManual - How to manually install the NVIDIA restricted drivers
Radeon_9200/9250_(RV280)_and_DVI - How to get DVI output working with ATI RV280 series video cards
Nvidia - How to install both the latest driver and the one in the repositories (also includes a detailed Problems Section)
Nvidia Troubleshooting - How to solve OpenGL Problems with NVIDIA Drivers
Nvidia TV Out - View X simultaneously on your monitor and TV
Nvidia manual drivers installation - How to install the Nvidia accelerated drivers without apt
Multiple monitors with NVIDIA - how to enable dual screens with the NVIDIA driver
For additional troubleshooting resources, please also see the Ubuntu X Team wiki
Xorg.conf.d
The xorg.conf.d directory (or xorg.conf file for older versions of Ubuntu) is the place that stores the configuration information for your input devices and output devices, such as video cards and monitors, as well as mice, keyboards, and tablets. This section focuses on the video card and monitor set-up.
In Ubuntu, the X configuration directory can be found at /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d. Many of the configurations settings in use aren't explicitly set by the files in this directory, but are rather hard-coded into the system. If you want to generate an old-style xorg.conf, you can boot into recovery mode, select root shell, and do:
In older versions of Ubuntu (through 9.10), the xorg.conf configuration file can be found in the /etc/X11 directory.
You can back it up:
To revert to the backup you simply reverse the order like this;
Before you start modifying your xorg.conf.d directory or xorg.conf file, it is strongly suggested you print out this page. While care is taken by your fellow user to ensure that everything will work, it is more often than not likely the case. Things do go wrong as you try to optimize your graphics driver and monitors.
Also it helps if you become familiar with <ctrl>+<alt>+F1 and similar key combinations. In older versions of Ubuntu, F1 to F6 were full screen terminals like the old terminals. F7 was the first x-window, F8 the second, F9 the third, etc. If you pressed <ctrl>+<alt>+F1 to F6 you would go into a terminal screen and then if you were to press <ctrl>+<alt>+F7 you would return to your graphical user interface. In newer versions of Ubuntu, <ctrl>+<alt>=F3 now takes you back to your graphical user interface.
The information below was written about pre-9.10 versions of Ubuntu, but can be analogous information for newer versions still applies:
When you restart your machine you should be able to recover quickly by simply restoring your xorg.conf file. Another good idea is to perform the two above copy command before you modify xorg.conf. That way the commands will be in your terminal history. You can then simply press up arrow on your keyboard to recover the key combinations.
If you have changed your xorg.conf file before having backed up and are experience problems, you can copy the /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the Ubuntu LiveCD to your hard disk /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (before this, backup the file as described before).
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If reverting back to the original xorg.conf file does not work for whatever reason and you are stuck in the terminal, you can execute the following command:
This will reconfigure your X server. Note: This will overwrite your current xorg.conf file. This command will not function in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) due to bug #474455.
Before you start modifying xorg.conf
It is important to know what the capabilities of your hardware is before you start. It is a good idea to find out maximum resolution, vertical and horizontal sync ranges and have them close at hand for both the monitor and video card. Without that information it will be difficult to configure your hardware correctly.
Monitors running at low resolution
Often if your running CRT monitors you find that the video card only seems to have options to display in low resolution mode. The trick to this is being able to edit the xorg.conf file in low resolution mode. There are two ways this can be done. Either in one of the terminal text editors or in the GUI (graphical user interface). You can use programs like vi, pico, with a command line like for terminal;
Ubuntu Graphics Driver Nvidia
If you not familiar with vi or pico the you could use a GUI like this;
Remember if the editor window is too large in the GUI you can hold down the <alt>+Button1 (left button) on your mouse to move the window about.
The method shown here is not foolproof. Configuring xorg.conf can be very tricky. But starting with the simplest method is sometimes the best. The first approach is to look for and modify a line that looks like one of these
or
and change it to something that looks like this;
You should aim to only go up one resolution step at a time and be prepared to use the <ctrl>+<alt>+F1 key combination. It is not a good idea to drive a monitor out of range for too long, it may cause permanent damage.
There are other approaches to that require substantial editing and understanding of xorg.conf files formats. A search of the Ubuntu forums first for similar examples and then the linux forums may yield results.
Twin View or Dual Head displays
Try using the GUI found in System->Preferences->Monitors, or for NVIDIA users check the solutions found in NvidiaMultiMonitors before you use the following approach. Most users will not need to edit xorg.conf in order to use multiple monitors.
The approach to getting Twin View or two monitors working in Ubuntu is much the same as getting a low resolution monitor working as described above.
The first step is to enable the proprietary drivers and getting them to work. Once you have the driver working you need to try and enable the second monitor. So long as you can enable the second monitor you have an easier chance of getting the second monitor working. (Note: Different video manufactures have different ways of enabling the second monitors and detailed information will be presented for each proprietary driver at some later date here.)
Like in the single monitor you are looking for a line in the xorg.conf file that looks something like this;
which could be changed to this;
What is interesting about this approach is that it seems to activate all the other resolutions as well.
You may also need to add other sections to your xorg.conf file such as this example;
It can be frustrating to configure xorg.conf because there is little information and each linux distro video card manufacture handles xorg.conf files sightly differently.
How to recover a non-booting system due to driver malfunction
If your computer does not boot when you have upgraded drivers, press escape at the GRUB bootloader, then choose 'recovery mode' for your latest kernel. Drop down to 'root shell' and then run the ATI uninstaller:
NOTE: Please, please, please be careful with the 'rm -rf' command - if you get this wrong, it could break your system!! Proceed with caution.
Then run this to restore your xorg.conf file to default:
The computer should boot now using the open source 'radeon' drivers, (it is important to keep these installed for a backup for this exact reason). If it doesn't boot with the radeon drivers automatically, go:
Where it says 'Device' you want to type 'radeon' or 'ati' in the 'Driver' field, so it looks like this:
Once you have booted back into Ubuntu, revert to an older version of the fglrx drivers, or continue to use the open source drivers if you like.
Graphics card not working correctly? Please follow the procedure in GraphicsTroubleshootingProcedure in order to get help from the Ubuntu community.
CategoryHardware
AMDGPU-PRO is AMD’s proprietary driver for its latest graphics cards. That means that it mainly covers the Polaris cards, the RX 4XX series and the RX 5XX series. It does work with older cards too, but they won’t see as much continual improvement and development.
Like its name suggests, AMDGPU-PRO is intended for professional use. Don’t worry. You can absolutely game with these drivers. AMD branded them for workstation users. As a result, AMD only releases the AMDGPU-PRO drivers for long-term support (LTS) releases and “Enterprise” distributions. For Ubuntu this means that you can only install these drivers on the latest LTS release. In this case, it’s 16.04.2.
Running an LTS release has some drawbacks. For starters, you won’t get the latest releases of new software on your system. You will get security fixes and some backports. You can get around a lot of these constraints in other ways, like importing applications such as Firefox from other releases, but it can be a pain to do so.
If you don’t want to run the LTS release or you already aren’t, you can always install the open-source AMDGPU drivers. In the latest releases of Ubuntu, they may even work out of the box, depending on your card. The open-source drivers don’t get all the new features of the proprietary ones, though, and are lacking in Vulkan support.
Getting the Packages
So you’ve chosen the Pro drivers. How do you get them? Since these drivers are AMD’s territory, they aren’t available in the Ubuntu repositories. You have to go to AMD’s website to download them.
Ubuntu Graphics Drivers Update
Open your browser and head over to the release notes on AMD’s website. Once you’re there, scroll down to the section that starts with, “The AMDGPU-Pro Driver can be downloaded…” The link for Ubuntu will be right below. Click it to download the drivers in a tar archive.
Navigate into your download folder and unpack the archive.
Your version number may be different depending on when you’re reading this, so make sure to use the right one.
Unpacking the archive will give you a folder with the same name. Change into the folder and get ready to install.
Installing AMDGPU-PRO
Once you’re in the folder, take a look around.
There are a lot of .deb packages in there. AMDGPU-PRO is odd when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux. In the past proprietary graphics drivers just contained some Linux kernel modules to interact directly with the kernel and the drivers themselves. This is still the way that NVIDIA does it.
AMD took a very different approach recently. All of AMD’s drivers are tightly integrated with the open-source software that makes graphical displays on Linux possible. There are a number of parts in that chain including the kernel itself, the Xorg Server, and direct rendering managers. AMDGPU-PRO is the open-source AMDGPU but with added bits that AMD doesn’t want to open-source yet.
Because AMD doesn’t want to open-source all of this code, they had to take over maintaining their own versions of the open-source packages that the drivers rely on to ensure that everything works well. That’s why there are so many packages with the driver. When you install the AMDGPU-PRO drivers, you are replacing the Ubuntu versions of your graphics packages with the AMD ones. They’re essentially the same, but this gives AMD a controlled environment to ensure that the drivers work perfectly.
Now for the simple part: AMD has included a convenient script to install everything for you in the folder. Just run the script with sudo.
Ubuntu Intel Graphics Driver
The script will run and install all of the packages that are required for your system. If you want it to ask you questions during the install, leave the “-y” off the end. That’s just there for convenience, and it’ll work fine most of the time.
Ubuntu Nvidia Graphics Driver
When the script is done, restart your computer and enjoy your new drivers!