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I have a GTX 640 4 GB. I need help with drivers and how to install them please. I'm still very new to Ubuntu. I've been using it as my dedicated OS for about a week but I can't get my graphics card working properly.

Niall C.
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Elijah Oneal
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1 Answers1

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I used to run an older version of Ubuntu, some seven years ago, on a machine that had an Nvidia Geforce card installed. To install the proprietary graphics drivers, I had to direct my browser to the nvidia website and select the appropriate options.

Now, it seems to me that "GTX 640" may not actually be the card's name. There is no "GTX" 640; however, there is a GT 640 in the same family of GeForce cards. To be sure, run the command: 

lspci | grep -i "vga"

in your terminal emulator of preference. (lspci prints all the pci devices installed in your machine. | takes that output and "pipes" it to grep, the search command, -i tells grep to ignore the case of the search string: "vga," which will single out your graphics card.) The output should look something like this:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)

except with your gpu's information instead.

If my assumption is correct: that you meant "GeForce GT 640;" then all you need to do is navigate to the page I linked, select the Product Type (GeForce), Product Series (600), Product (GT 640), Operating System (Linux 32 or 64 bit, if you don't know which, see below), and Language (default is English). Press search, and on the next page, download the binary, NVIDIA-Linux-architecture.version.run. (<-that is a mock file name, the important part is that it ends in the extention .run)

(to find out whether you are running 32 or 64 bit architecture, run:

uname -i

you may also be interested in the output of the -a option.)

Open a terminal, change your working directory to the directory where the downloaded driver installer is kept. (If you are browsing with FireFox, the default location is ~/Downloads). execute it with:

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-architecture.version.run

Again, that is a mock file name. Just type the first few letters of NVIDIA and hit tab to save yourself some time.

Follow the CLI instructions, reboot, and pray.

sage a.
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  • yah sorry i got ahead of myself iv bin kinda frustrated it is a GT 640 when i download the driver and click on it this text editor window pops up and at the end always fails thank you for all your help. – Elijah Oneal Dec 20 '14 at 04:40
  • It also tends to go black several times wile its loading in text editor. Iv guessed that it means it's stopped responding or something but it always goes back to normal color. – Elijah Oneal Dec 20 '14 at 06:01
  • Don't click it. run it from terminal with sudo sh as explained in my answer. – sage a. Dec 20 '14 at 20:33