Okay, I’m geekier than 99% of the population. I’ve played with Linux. Heck, I was messing with Unix in 1988.
What I don’t understand is how some just don’t understand than the VAST majority out there will NEVER do what you just did. They will not tinker with setting just to get something to work. I don’t want to do that and I generally enjoy computers.
The Linux community, what is left of it, is composed of a bunch of masochists. Other than the neat sound created by beating your head against a wall...why? Is it REALLY more secure? Kinda sorta. Any real deep geek will tell you that with enough time and tools you can be cracked. It is more of security by obscurity.
Story...I had a Linux box and I bought a Linux friendly (supposedly) graphics card. Back then there was a LONG installation guide that was different for various flavors of Linux that had you typing rather long, obscure, commands in the terminal. After doing all this, it still wouldn’t work. I ended up spending hours digging through forums until I found out about an incompatibility between my motherboard, my video card, and my flavor of Linux. It required a change in installation commands. So basically, after about 6 hours, I was able to get the video card to work. Yay.
Even today, a couple of years later, it isn’t that much better. A “simple” Linux video card installation is:
First, make sure that your system is updated and Linux headers are installed.
To make sure they are, just use the following command in the terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
Installing the Nvidia drivers can be done in three easy steps. First, install the drivers themselves with
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
in a terminal.
The next step is more of a safety measure as there are cases when the Nvidia installation script doesn’t run this command. This can lead to severe problems when the system reboots, so the solution here is just to run the command again separately:
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig .
Finally, reboot your system using the reboot command to apply your changes.
Then do in terminal:
$ sudo apt-get remove nvidia* && sudo apt-get autoremove
Next, reboot and when you’re back at the login screen press CTRL + Alt + F1 to switch to command console. Login here with your username and password. When you’re at the text console, you’ll have to kill the current graphics session by running $ sudo stop lightdm.
Finally, give permissions to the downloaded driver package and run it with:
cd /Downloads && chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-*-346.35.run && sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-*-361.42.run
From here, just follow the onscreen instructions and then reboot your computer. At next boot, run $ sudo nvidiaxconfig to save your new configuration. Optionally, you can also blacklist the nouveau driver to prevent it from installing itself during a system update or uninstall them completely.
If you want to do this, edit the following config file with:
$ gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
Once in the file, add the following lines at the end and save the file.
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveauoptions nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off
You can also choose to disable the kernel nouveau by running the following commands one by one:
$ echo options nouveau modeset=0 | sudo tee -a /etc/
modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf
$ sudo update-initramfs –u
And once you reboot you’re done!
Isn’t that easy!
I understand exactly what you are saying. I was excited that there was by my measures an easy way to add Windows Subsystem For Android to Windows 10. It took me about 10 minutes and since I had previous experience with the same software package in Windows 11 there were no complications.
Getting similar software working in Ubuntu turned into a fairly advanced exercise. It took me several additional steps not mentioned in the first set of directions to get it working at all. Every one of these steps were done from the command line which many beginners have trouble with.
I also had to register the Android installation with Google as a developer before Google would allow their pieces of the puzzle to cooperate so that I could use the Google Play store. And I am not talking about merely logging in through a browser. I had to have a very long number generated that was associated with my installation. This was a command line operation as well. If I hadn’t found detailed explanations from others going down the same path it never would have been accomplished.
The last few days I have been trying to get a vintage flight simulator yoke and rudder pedals with 15 pin game controller outputs to play nice with USB. I had to do quite a bit of digging for schematics, probing with my multimeter and figuring out how to rewire the devices so that they would work with my adapter, then adding additional resistors and unsoldering and resoldering the connections within the yoke and pedals so that they could meet the specifications. It should have been easy, but it turned into more of a challenge than I had expected.
I understand completely that most people have no interest in these types of challenges, but there are still a few of us, including my grandson who is extremely capable in these types of projects.