Nvidia drivers & Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

***If your looking for the Nvidia Driver Installation guide, check http://www.sucka.net/2010/04/how-to-install-nvidia-video-driver-in-10-04-lucid-lynx/

Reading the Ubuntu Lucid development forum, I noticed most people can’t get the new Plymouth to work with Nvidia proprietary drivers. Some get just some errors, some see just some blue progress bar, etc.

But here is a very easy solution for getting Plymouth working with proprietary Nvidia drivers (and it works in VirtualBox too). Being so easy, I don’t understand why they haven’t included this tweak in Ubuntu Lucid yet, but I suppose there is a reason behind this so be aware of this before proceeding.

WARNING: Only follow this how-to if you know what you are doing. If you make any mistakes, Ubuntu might not start!

Here is what you have to do to get Plymouth working with proprietary Nvidia drivers:

Step 1: we must edit the /etc/default/grub file.

Open a terminal and type or paste this (if you are using the Run menu within Gnome use gksudo instead of plain old sudo):

$ sudo nano /etc/default/grub
On line #18, uncomment (uncomment = remove the “#” in front of the line “#GRUB_GFXMODE=640×480” and change the resolution to whatever you want. Here is how it should look:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
Step 2: edit the /etc/grub.d/00_header file.

$ sudo nano /etc/grub.d/00_header
And find the following line: “gfxmode=${GRUB_GFXMODE}” (it’s line 103 on my computer) and under it, paste this:

set gfxpayload=keep
Step 3: update Grub 2:

To update the GRUB, simply run the following command:

$ sudo update-grub
Once you complete the above steps, restart the computer and you should see the nice Plymouth screen like in the screenshot in the beginning of the post.