UPDATE: NVidia have released new (non-beta) drivers which you can find here.

If you have a 9000 series NVidia graphics card (eg 9800, 9600), you must manually install video card drivers from the NVidia site, there is not suitable drivers in the repos (ie you cannot enable restricted drivers for your video card).

A consequence of this is that every time a new kernel is installed by synaptic, you will need to reinstall your driver. Luckily, it is pretty straight forward. Follow the steps below (this works on Hardy 64-bit with an NVidia 9600GT) to install the latest beta driver from NVidia.

1. Visit NVidia to download the latest driver. You can find the beta driver page by following the links Download Drivers > Beta and Archived Drivers and then choosing your video card, operating system etc. The direct link to 64-bit beta driver 173.08 is here.UPDATE: New non-beta driver 173.14.05 for 64-bit is here.

2. You need to build a new kernel module when installing the driver, so make sure you have the necessary requirements by running this command in a console;

sudo apt-get install build-essential

3. Open a tty by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1

4. Stop gdm by running;

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

5. Run the NVidia installation script as a superuser;

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

6. If you have previously installed the driver, the installer will ask if you want to uninstall the previous driver, answer yes.

7. Answer yes to all other questions. Once the installer has finished, the driver is installed. You can then restart the gdm by running;

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

8. To complete the installation, disable the “nv” module. If this step is not done, you will run into problems next time you boot. Run the following;

sudo gedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

Add the following line to the bottom of the file;

DISABLED_MODULES="nv"

9. Finally, you can run “nvidia-settings” to tweak your new driver through the NVidia control panel.

With thanks to Enthrall.

Not much happening on my Hardy install, it Just Works. However, today I was prompted to install the first swag of updates since upgrading from my beta install to the “gold” release. 23 MB of updates, from evolution, to hal and apport.

Many people are finding that fonts in FF3 are displaying incorrectly. It seems that this is an easy issue to fix. Open the about:config page in FF. Find the preference name;

layout.css.dpi

It is set to -1 by default. Change it to something more appropriate like 96 and close the about:config page. Your font isses will be resolved.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron is due for release on April 24. Some of hardy’s features include;

• Gnome 2.22
• Linux kernel 2.6.24
• PulseAudio
• Xorg 7.3
• Firefox 3
• Brasero

I installed Hardy on my Dell XPS M1210 and noticed another great feature, native read/write support of NTFS partitions. There is now no longer any need to install drivers such as ntfs-3g. As an LTS release, this version is supported for at least three years by Canonical.

Here is a screenshot of the standard desktop with a few apps open. The Human theme tends towards more orange than brown these days.