Rob's Blog

The latest Linux NVidia drivers (180.29) finally contain a fix to a long-standing bug that affects 2D rendering performance in Firefox. Until this release, many javascript-powered visual effects (such as the Javascript image transition on this site) have caused horrendous performance in Firefox. A big thank you to NVidia for finally fixing this!

To install the drivers on Ubuntu:

1. Download the drivers from the NVidia site to your home directory
2. Log out of your Gnome / KDE session
3. Start a virtual terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1, and log in to your account
4. Remove any old NVidia packages you might have with
   sudo apt-get remove nvidia*
5. Stop Gnome with
   sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
   Could someone please provide the equivalent command for KDE?
6. Switch to run level 3 with
   sudo init 3
7. Install the drivers with
   sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.29-pkg1.run
   Just follow the prompts (and basically press enter a lot)
8. Once the installation has completed, restart your machine with:
   sudo shutdown -r now

Once you’ve rebooted, you should be running the latest drivers in all their 2D performance glory!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Computers.