[WAY WAY OT] Ubuntu 10.04 and Nvidia driver

[john wendel]

I just tried the live-CD of Ubuntu 10.04 and generally found it to be 
very nicely done. But there was a big problem with the Nvidia driver 
that I thought we could all learn something from my experience (like 
"don't be stupid"), and maybe have a chuckle or two.

After starting, a "helpful" pop-up told me that I needed the Nvidia 
driver if I wanted 3D acceleration and certain other (unspecified) 
enhancements. It offered to install the driver (after explaining why it 
was BAD from a free software perspective), so I said OK. I was then 
offered a choice from the 3 driver versions, without any explanation of 
which one I needed (I needed the 173 version), and the "recommended" 
version was the latest (195 version). STRIKE 1! I selected the 173 
version and clicked the "activate" button. After some 
downloading/installing, I was told that I needed to restart the system 
to use the new driver. IT'S A LIVE CD FOLKS! Restarting of course wiped 
out the new driver download. STRIKE2! So, I did the download again and 
this time instead of restarting the system, I just restarted X. Luckily, 
I know how to kill and restart X because there is no newbie friendly 
menu selection to do this. Of course, it didn't work because the Nouveau 
driver got loaded first and kept the Nvidia driver from loading. STRIKE 
3! I'm out.

Of course, with an installed version of Ubuntu, this process would 
probably have worked fine. I really wish the best for Ubuntu, but I 
think I'll stick with Fedora.

Sorry for the noise.

Regards,

John