How to tell if my system's Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 graphics card driver is suitable or not?

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I am a pretty new user for Linux-like systems and I have installed Lubuntu 17.10 on an old desktop machine which has an Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 graphics card. But I have no idea if the graphics card driver installed suits that device or not. How can I determine if I am using the right driver?

I looked for Nvidia’s own drivers for the Nvidia GeForce FX 5500, which came out to be nvidia-173. Am I supposed to be installing that? I have read that it won’t be available after Ubuntu 14.x?

Earlier I installed Ubuntu 16.04 and it felt miserably slow with GUI operations so I am concerned if my graphics card driver is the proper one for this card.

I run Windows XP on that same machine with no problems related to graphics.

Nae

Posted 2017-12-23T16:55:14.530

Reputation: 171

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Have you looked at the info in this thread?

– JakeGould – 2017-12-23T17:09:54.563

1Seems like my best bet would be installing Xubuntu 14.04 instead. – Nae – 2017-12-23T21:05:26.160

Answers

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According to this answer on Ask Ubuntu, the latest drivers are at version 173.14.35. Since .deb packages are provided on that page, you can install them via the dpkg command which helps manages packages made for the Debian Package Management System. Just do the following…

First, open up a terminal and download those .deb packages via Wget:

wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-173-updates/173.14.35-0ubuntu1/+build/3597638/+files/nvidia-173-updates-dev_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-173-updates/173.14.35-0ubuntu1/+build/3597638/+files/nvidia-173-updates_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Once you have those download those packages, install them via the dpkg command with the -i flag like this:

sudo dpkg -i nvidia-173-updates-dev_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-173-updates_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

And then, I would recommend reboot your system and seeing what happens. This should be fine.

If not, you can remove those packages by running the dpkg command again with the -r flag like this:

sudo dpkg -r nvidia-173-updates-dev_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -r nvidia-173-updates_173.14.35-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Hope this helps!

JakeGould

Posted 2017-12-23T16:55:14.530

Reputation: 38 217

Thanks a lot for helping me but that package too seems like it is for ubuntu 12 precise only, wouldn't that be bad for me? – Nae – 2017-12-23T20:52:48.067

@Nae “…seems like it is for ubuntu 12 precise only…” Nah. Many times drivers are packaged at a specific time for a specific OS. Like this one package in 2012. But many times these drivers can be used for future releases as well. The worst that would happen is it doesn’t work. I you feel safer playing around with an LTS version—such as 14.04 or even 16.04—that is a better choice than a bleeding edge OS version like 17.10. LTS versions are better bets than the bleeding edge releases unless you specifically need features in that bleeding edge version. – JakeGould – 2017-12-23T22:39:06.400

Asked: 2017-12-23T16:55:14.530

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Active: 2017-12-23T22:32:58.920