I'm new here, so please be forgiving if I break any norms on this forum. :) I hope I am posting this in the right section!
I have been watching Tek Syndicate for a longer while and I enjoy their videos a lot, and with Logan trying out Linux on his home PC I decided I should atleast try it out on some of my secondary machines at home at the very least. A headsup, Ive been using almost nothing else but Windows XP and Windows 7, if you count out my very young days with Windows 95/98/ME. I have almost 0 previous experience with Linux, but I recognise the need for a free and open operating system, especially with Microsofts new headings with Windows 8 (ugh) and Windows 10 and its questionable privacy. This all means I really have no idea about Terminal commands, even though I am trying my very best to learn it as I go.
Said and done, I grabbed my old Asus G53SX laptop and installed Mint 17 on it. It has a Nvidia GTX 560m GPU and an Intel mobile i7 CPU (Exact model name escapes me right now) The laptop is going to be used as a media PC, connected to a TV with HDMI, and will be using a controller to play games over Steam in-home streaming (or locally for supported titles.) And this will be a thread where I hopefully can come back to and post updates whats going on and if I run into any problems.
Also, I will start out with a case that stumped me very quickly. As my goal here is to learn to use other OSs other than Windows, not to go 100% open source I looked into installing the Nvidia properitary drivers, expecting (Remember, I'm coming from Windows) it to be a simple task of downloading a package from Nvidias website; I was wrong. I looked into different guides online, but the ones I actually have tried has so far yielded no results other than one step somewhere in the guide failing, leaving me stuck. So, if anyone can help me, lets start from step 1. :)
On better news, I have successfully installed Wine and PlayOnLinux, then used the latter to install the original StarCraft and played a few missions from the campaign which ran like a charm. Very satisfying!
Have you looked in Additional Drivers? I think it should be available for you since Mint is based on Ubuntu.
Also, did you follow this guide? You simply run "sudo sh /path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.09.07.run" You may have to dig around for an x64 version. I only did a quick search.
You typically do not download and install drivers on GNU/Linux like you're used to. The drivers are implemented in the Linux kernel and (don't quote me on this) I think for legal reasons, some propreitary drivers need to be "switched on" by the end-user.
Yeah try the Drivers Application first. And the propriatory dirvers are not included in the kenrel. That is why there is an application that installs them automatically. Easiest way.
I was/am just like you except I've had a bit of experience with Linux in the distant past (at least 2 - 3 years since I've messed with it). Again, just like you, I thought installing NVIDIA drivers for my GTX 980 would be a simple process and, in truth, it is now that I've installed several distros over the last week or so in an effort to see which I prefer.
Here are my steps from a fresh Mint install.
Go to NVIDIA site and run the search for your driver just like you would in Windows (obviously making sure you chose Linux). From the list, choose whichever suits your card the best (you may want to run a quick Google search for your exact card as some of the older drivers may work better for you) and download it.
Reboot and at the Mint login use ctrl+alt+F1 (or F2 - F5) to access a pre-login terminal. For whatever reason, when I have a brand spankin' new Linux install it takes a couple reboots before I can get the pre-login terminal to appear on screen.... don't know why but it does. So, if you use the key combo above and get a black screen just reboot and try the key combo again.
From the pre-login terminal run sudo service mdm stop and plug your credentials in when prompted.
From the pre-login terminal run chmod +x ~/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.47.run && sudo sh ~/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.47.run (substituting your driver version number and location where you downloaded it if different than mine).
Follow the on screen prompts and viola! When you boot back into Mint you should have accelerated graphics already enabled and in my case a much more pleasant looking desktop.
Lets see, I've found what I assume is the Additional Drivers menu (My OS is in Swedish, so names are a bit different), in here I found drivers for my GPU. It was set on the Nouveau display driver, but the recommended option is nvidia-331 which I assume is the one I want. Its "applying changes" currently.
Is this the latest version? In any case for the future, how would I go ahead about updating it, does it come automatically in the system updater?
It's not the latest one in general, but the latest one that it offers, unfortunately. New ones should come with an update, but the driver updates come once a long time... when I started my adventure with Linuxes 3 years ago, Ubuntu used the previous (304) version of drivers, so it goes really slow. I really wouldn't worry about it ;)
Hm, alright. It should be fine as long as it is stable.
But now I noticed something weird. PlayOnLinux has suddenly vanished, and the only game, StarCraft, which I installed with it, cannot be started. Looking in the program manager, it says that it is not installed. Futher so, it says it needs 248 MB of diskspace to be installed, but 0B to be downloaded, and it pretty much instantly reinstalled upon me clicking the install button. That is most strange, but is this perhaps related to me switching GPU drivers?
Edit 1:Hm, no. It automatically rediscovred StarCraft, but if I try and launch it now I recieve a window saying "Error in main. Starcraft crashed. Click on debug link to get more details." Looking at the debug it says a lot, but if I am to try and pick out important details it says "Direct rendering disabled, most likely your OpenGL drivers haven't been installed correctly..." Any ideas?
Edit 2: After a restart, it actually does not crash anymore, but now the game only gives audio and no image. Forcing the game to shut down gives the error box again, now saying "Error in POL_Wine. Wine seems to have crashed. If your program is running, just ignore this message." And the desktop seems to have changed to a 4:3 ratio, so theres black borders on each side of the screen.
I have to disagree. The open drivers didn't run very well at all for me on a 980. I installed the latest non-beta prop driver from NVIDIA site, installed as I noted above, and have much better performance all around.
I'm curious though, what's the reasoning behind not using the latest official NVIDIA drivers? I've seen forum (not necessarily this forum) comments about that and most of the time it's just a matter of people not wanting to use anything closed source which I can understand IF the open source drivers work better but they didn't for me. So, why not use official NVIDIA drivers and is there a more automated way of installing official NVIDIA drivers than my manual method noted above? I've done it a few times in the last several weeks. It's a quick and easy process but if there's a better way I'd love to know.
This repo is a lot easier to setup and get running than Nvidia's .RUN file.
That's driver 346, 15 versions newer than the 'Additional Drivers' tool. I saw a HUGE improvement as Nvidia only recently started fixing up their Linux drivers.
What are you talking about? I haven't mentioned the open drivers, just a bit outdated proprietary drivers. There is no sense what so ever to mess with the ones from Nvidia website unless one really needs to, just like when one has a 900 series GPU. It's actually all fault of the retarded, outdated Ubuntu repo.
A quick update regarding my Wine issue, its defenitely related to the GPU drivers in some way. Going back to the open source ones instantly fixes the previous issue and displays my game in correct fullscreen. Weird! But not extremely important for what I will use this machine for.
Also installed a much nicer dark theme, the bright white default theme of Mint was never my style. http://www.noobslab.com/2014/01/ambiance-dark-theme-for-ubuntulinux.html I found no theme that fit my liking in the theme browsers, hence I used that guide. (Did this on a virtual testing machine only for now.) Feels much better!
One thing I realised while tweaking the looks for my liking, there does not seem to be any wallpaper-slideshow function, or am I missing something obvious? :)
Hello! Sorry for the long delay. Ive been busy, Ive been sick, and I ran into a snag! The machine above has been borrowed to be used as an internet bridge until the LAN is sorted out in the house, going through some upgrades currently.
When doing the bridging I naturally wanted to use Linux first and did some looking around, and I have to say: Wow, is it that complicated to accomplish? Its super easy to bridge the ethernet port with WiFi on Windows 7, so thats what its doing right now.
Things changed again and the intended machine had to be relocated to become an ownCloud, Mumble and private game server for me and my friends. I still have not given up on Linux though, not by far!
The privacy issues with Windows 10 is making me more and more interested in learning Linux. In fact, since a month or two I am running Ubuntu Gnome as a dual boot on my main desktop machine.
This thread is slightly obsolete by now though, so I will perhaps do some posting in other threads. Thank you for your help in the past!