Ubuntu – Correct way to install nvidia-173 driver on Ubuntu 12.04

12.04driversnvidia

After chasing around an unfortunate bug wherein my Dell's Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 requires a driver other than either nouveau or nvidia-current, I came across this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-173/+bug/948053

Trouble is I'm not certain how to proceed from here – and I'm also really, really cautious about doing this, because the last two or three times I tried to install drivers for this card I ended up with bad resolution and/or a blank screen, and I did end up reinstalling Ubuntu at least once.

I'm fairly positive that there's no error with the card as it worked under Windows XP on the same machine not a month ago, so I believe the error was human. :/ What's the best way to install based on the information in the link above, and if it goes belly up, what's the right way to reverse it? I'm not terribly excited to reinstall again 🙂 Thanks.

Best Answer

At least for my part, I believe this is solved.

Recently, the driver I was reading much about - 173.14.35 - was released in a means that I could access and install using apt-get. The link in the original question leads to the announcement that nvidia-173 on precise-proposed has been updated to xxx.xx.35, and so it's a matter of following the directions listed on this page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed

As this is a rather new fix, I will not guarantee it works for everyone with a legacy Nvidia card under Ubuntu 12.04. But for my money this was far favorable to downgrading Xorg or rolling back to an older OS.

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