Tag: linux

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Installing latest Nvidia 361 drivers on Ubuntu / Linux Mint

I’ve posted a few times about installing the nvidia-304 legacy drivers on Linux Mint, which I’ve been using on an HP desktop which has nvidia 6150 graphics on the motherboard.

I just upgraded to a shiny new geforce 750ti card which runs in this same HP, powered through the PCI-E slot so and doesn’t need any additional power (which would have required ugrading the PSU too).

To upgrade my nvidia drivers in Linux Mint, it seems the latest 361 drivers are not available in the main apt-get repos, and even if you add a ppa, it seems they’re not there yet either. Luckily, to install from the download on the nvidia site it’s pretty easy.

To summarize the steps I took based on the instructions here:

  • remove the current nvidia drivers: 
    sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
  • kill the current Mint DM: 
    sudo service mdm stop
  • sudo the driver .run executable downloaded from the nvidia site.. chmod +x it if needed. Reboot, and done! Running the latest drivers!
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Linux Mint Cinnamon upgrade 17.1 to 17.3 – Cinnamon crash with nvidia-304

I’ve been using Mint Cinnamon 17.1 as my main desktop OS, of all the Linux distros I’ve played with in the past couple of years, this is my favorite by far (in terms of simplicity of the Desktop Environment).

17.3 Rosa came out recently, so I hadn’t upgraded for a while, so updated via the menu link in the software package manager.

I realized from installing and configuring 17.1 before that I needed to use the older nvidia-304 graphics – I have an older HP mobo with nvidia 6150SE graphics on the motherboard, and the best driver seems to be nvidia-304.

The upgrade itself was without issue, but after rebooting and logging on, within a few sessions I got the message “Cinnamon just crashed. You are currently running in Fallback Mode” and various parts of the screen started not refreshing. At one point when I pressed Yes on the dialog, but that resulted in more corruption to the point where individual characters became scrambled and not readable.

Seems like others are having the same issue too:

From feedback from others, it seems 17.2 was the last stable version for them, so I reinstalled 17.2 from a dvd, completely wiping my / partition. Luckily my docs and everything else I needed to keep was on a separate /home partition, so this worked out for me.

Usually any issues with a distro are on the initial install. This is the first time I can think of that doing an upgrade had significant issues, so hopefully they can get it sorted.

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Linux shell history

Useful tips:

  • history – list history of all recorded shell history
  • history n – list last n statements
  • !n – execute nth statement from history
  • !! execute last statement
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Linux, Direwolf packet radio and alsa sound levels

Getting soundcard levels with alsasound on Linux dialed in for any Amateur Radio soundcard based comms can be tricky (at least in my experience).

If you’ve plugged in an additional USB soundcard device like a Rigblaster or a SignaLink, it’s important to know that the ‘master’ volume level in alsamixer applies to all soudcards. Make sure you have the master volume up, in addition to the soundcard that you have going to your transceiver.

Here’s what the default soundcard alsamixer display looks like for me – notice the master volume not muted (MM = muted), and level around 3/4:

Press F6 to switch/select the USB Rigblaster device levels.

Here’s alsamixer for Rigblaster USB soundcards, playback/output (F3) at 3/4:

Capture/input (F4) at 3/4:

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