Ubuntu – How to find out which cards are supported by the nouveau driver

You can't make it use the nvidia proprietary driver, but you can force it not to use nouveau by selecting the "nomodeset" option during boot.

The Live CD allows you to press a key at boot-up then press F6 (if I recall correctly) to set boot options, and "nomodeset" should be one of them.

That should cause the Live CD to use a fallback VESA graphics mode. It will look dodgy, but it should work, and once you have installed Ubuntu you can then install the nVidia driver.

nvidiafb is a framebuffer driver inside the Linux Kernel. Is not the proprietary module from nvidia. (nvidia.ko).

If you want to see the short description of the module, issue the following command in terminal

modinfo nvidiafb | grep description

If you want to read more a about framebuffer , read the FrambeBuffer on Ubuntu Wiki.

You can see if some nvidia package is installed by applying the following command

dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia

If you want to search if the nouveau module is loaded you can apply

lsmod | grep nouveau

If nvidia restricted module was loaded , then the nouveau module Cannot be loaded too (conflict each other).

Nvidia's (restricted) module name is nvidia . Not nvidiafb or something similar.

Also you can search from Additional Drivers page . In example below , no proprietary drivers are in use

And another command that can show you, which driver is in use:

lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga 

There you will see a line like

kernel driver in use: *****

If it's nvidia , then you have nvidia driver installed and in use. If it's nouveau, then you don't.