Installing Nvidia drivers on Linux Mint 17.1

Booting the Mint Live DVD on a HP Pavilion with an AMD Phenom quadcore, I get to the desktop but it starts lagging, and is barely responsive. Selecting the compatibility mode boot option gets me to a lower res desktop but without the lagging issue. After I installed to my hd using compatibility mode, when booting up for the first time I ran into exactly the same issue.

At the Grub menu, if I edit the boot option and add nomodeset, then again, I can boot into a low res with no lag. This desktop has a Nvidia graphics card, so I tried following the instructions here, but I couldn’t get these steps to work, every time I ran the Nvidia installer, it kept telling me that the nouveau drivers were still loaded.

This page suggested to install via ‘sudo apt-get install nvidia-304’ – this approach seemed to download all the deps, build local, install, setup and configure, all in one go. When I rebooted, all looked good, and no need to manually add the nomodeset at the grub menu. Success! So far very impressed with the slickness of the Mint Cinnamon desktop!

 

Using bower for webapp package management: ui-date

Looking for a calendar widget to use with my AngularJS app, I found this one. This is also the first library I’ve come across where I’ve needed to use bower to install it for me. I’ve seen and used bower as part of the AngularJS tutorial, but this is my first experience using it out of necessity.

I already have node.js installed for the AngularJS tutorial, so installed bower globally using:

sudo npm install -g bower

and then installed the angular-ui date picker with:

bower install angular-ui-date --save

Following the rest of the steps to include the dependent js and css files, add the ui-date directive to an input field… and that was easy, now I have a jQuery UI date picker!