23 October 2012

Install Nvidia Driver 310.14 On Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/Linux Mint 13



Nvidia driver 310.14 is a new beta driver that has been released recently which added support for OpenGL 4.3 with GL4-capable hardware and OpenGL threaded optimizations. This driver has also fixed some Unity related bugs.


Here are the changes in this driver:

• Implemented workarounds for two Adobe Flash bugs by applying libvdpau commit ca9e637c61e80145f0625a590c91429db67d0a40 to the version of libvdpau shipped with the NVIDIA driver.
• Fixed an issue which affected the performance of moving windows of VDPAU applications when run in some composite managers.
• Added unofficial GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object OpenGL extension.
• Added support for HDMI 3D Stereo with Quadro Kepler and later GPUs. See the documentation for the "Stereo" X configuration option in the README for details.
• Added experimental support for OpenGL threaded optimizations, available through the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS environment variable. For more information, please refer to the "Threaded Optimizations" section in chapter "Specifying OpenGL Environment Variable Settings" of the README.
• Improved performance and responsiveness of windowed OpenGL applications running inside a Unity session.
• Added support for OpenGL 4.3.
• Added support for the "Backlight" RandR output property for configuring the brightness of some notebook internal panels.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the Ubuntu Unity launcher panel from unhiding: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1057000
• Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-installer to sometimes attempt to write a log file in a nonexistent directory.
• Fixed a bug that caused incorrect input transformation after resizing an NVIDIA X screen with xserver ABI 12 (xorg-server 1.12) or newer.
• Fixed a bug that caused GLX to leak memory when Xinerama is enabled.
In this article we will see how to install Nvidia 310.14 in the following Linux distributions:

  • Ubuntu 12.10/12.04
  • Linux Mint 13/12
Driver Installation

Open the terminal and install Nvidia 310.14 from PPA at your own risk with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

For manual installation, do the following:

- Open the terminal and run these commands:

cd && wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47950494/upubuntu.com/nvidia-310-14

 chmod +x nvidia-310-14

- Press CTRL+ALT+F3 and use your login credentials.

- Kill xserver with this command:

 sudo service lightdm stop

- Install now the driver with this command:

cd && sudo sh nvidia-310-14

- Finally, reboot your system:

sudo reboot

If you have troubles installing the driver, you can check this article which will help you install the driver via Recovery Mode.