I’ve recently upgraded my old desktop. For this occasion I decided to go for an Nvidia video card (the GeForce GT220) since it is better supported than ATI cards; and while at it, I also decided to go for a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit, of course). Everything went smoothly. The install time took less than 15 minutes and I was really pleased to see how well the new machine performs.
However, I noticed that large windows lagged when I dragged them around, and the general visual experience on my 25.5″ monitor was far from good. As I suspected, there was no video acceleration enabled. Easy, all I have to do is just to install the Nvidia drivers, right? Wrong.
Searching for the correct drivers on the ‘Download’ section of the Nvidia website returned no results. This was weird, since I knew the card has been out for a while. They couldn’t even provide test/beta drivers. Maybe they didn’t update the search database for this model yet? I don’t know. What I do know is that I went and looked on their FTP server and found something! Apparently the drivers do exist!
Here is the link to the latest Linux drivers for the GeForce GT220 (64-bit): ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/190.42/
Next I downloaded all the packages and proceeded to install them. This is the order in which you should proceed for a painless and correct installation process:
- Make sure you have updated to the latest stable release of the Linux kernel.
- Download the driver packages from the link provided above.
- Terminate X server, by following these steps:
- press ALT+CTRL+F2(or 3, or 4…)
- login with your username/password
- stop the X server and GDM by typing this command: `
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop`.
- Install the drivers by going to the directory where you downloaded the files to and executing the 1st package: `
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-190.18-pkg0.run`. Just ‘accept’ the proposed configuration and click on ‘OK’. Hopefully you should not get any errors. - Once the installation has successfully completed, it’s time to restart the X server / GDM: `
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start`. - The welcome screen should be up and running now and you can login.
This is it! It’s that simple!
I decided to post this since there was no guide for the GeForce GT220 install under Linux. I believe you can safely use this method to install any GT200 series. Please let me know if this guide helped you at all. 
Andrei~
WebIDauth Project
Unfortunately doesn’t work for me under Debian.. It wants Linux kernel sources or something.. Says something about trees.. Perhaps it is time to try Arch anyway..
@Jasper, Use the package manager to install the kernel headers. They are needed to compile the kernel module used by nvidia drivers.
Hey man~
It helps! Thx
The 3D acceleration is working fine, but the noise of the fans still remains (ASUS version). I give up !
I decided to buy an ATI card with passive cooling
@Clem, try using my guide and tell me if it worked or not.
In the documentation, they say that the pkg2 file is compliant with most of configurations.
I installed it on ubuntu 9.10 but I don’t see any changes in the annoying fan speed :-/
@Clem, no idea. Have you tried using only that package (pkg2)? I’m not exactly sure if you need all three or not.
Thank you for your feed back.
The Nvidia driver finder now is able to show the drivers for GT 220 chipsets : http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_190.42.html
But when trying downloading, we’re forced to download the *.pkg2.run driver.
Is there a difference with the *.pkg0.run file you recommend ?
It works wonderfully, thanks for sharing with us
You’re welcome! I’ve updated the guide to include the last version of the drivers. Thanks for mentioning it!
Andrei~
Yup, the 190.32 package worked for me too. Even though nvidia says it isn’t compatible with GT 220. Cheers Andrei, much appreciated!
Worked well. I am using the 190.40 version which was the latest I could see on the FTP site link you provided. Just looked for the highest number directory name here: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/ and came up with 190.40 (eg ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/190.40/)
Thanks for your help!!
Simon
It worked like charm…. Thank you very much
Worked fine for me with NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-190.32 available at:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/190.32/
Thank you very much for the useful information.
Thanks very much for this – just the info I was looking for! Although, I am finding that the resolution resets to 1024×800 on startup, despite writing the correct resolution to Xorg.conf – anyone else having this problem?
@nick: any chance you can paste here the error message? If it’s more than 5 lines, try to use something like http://pastie.org
I’m new to ubuntu and linux in general. But how come when i go to install the driver it say unable to open the driver. Am I screwing something up. or what .
Thank you again Andrei
the nvidia-setting was what I was looking for. It turns out that when I click on Display under System -> Preferences I get the option to use nvidia-settings instead of the usual Ubuntu Display manager, I just didn’t see that right away. Thanks again for helping getting the GT220 to work with Ubuntu and keep up the good work
X.
Hey!
I’m glad everything worked out alright!
About tweaking your settings for 3d games, I suppose the nvidia control panel could provide more info. You should have the package already installed. If you can’t find the application in the menus, try running `nvidia-settings` (might need to use sudo -> `sudo nvidia-settings`). I hope this helped!
Andrei~
Thank you.
This worked like a charm. Ubuntu now looks good and got a lot quieter with the graphic card fan turned down significantly. One question though; do you need to tweak the settings, e.g. to optimize for use with 3d-games or applications? And if so, how do you do that?
Great tutorial!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
This helped me use all 1920×1080 pixels and all 23″ diagonal on my brand new monitor. 1280×800 stretched to 19″ was getting annoying–but more annoying than that was the fact that the official “tested” nVidia driver for my shitty integrated graphics was broken.
I’m glad it helped.
Great ! thanks, also solved the fan problem of the graphic board running full speed all the time