SUCCESS!! Kind of. Things are almost fully working, and working well enough. The video card driver (190.25) is now installed and I don't have the funky 6 screen problem. All graphics seem to work (i.e. desktop effects) although I haven't had time to do any deep analysis of how well the card works.
Here are the minor issues I'm still having if anyone would like to suggest a work around. I can't suspend(sleep) my computer properly. If I try to suspend, like closing the laptop lid or whatever, when I come out of sleep mode the graphics are broken. Instead of the 6 screen problem from before, now I get an extremely fuzzy screen, with the colors shaking and out of sync. If I reboot the computer everything gets fixed. Any thoughts on how I can keep this from happening, it would be nice to not have a need to shut the computer down each time I want to walk from one building to the next.
I also can't switch users without getting a really shaky and fuzzy screen. I have an account for myself and my wife, but to switch we have to shutdown the computer before logging into the other account. Rather annoying, but I can live with that. I'm hoping there might be an easy solution like refreshing or rebooting the xserver before logging into that account. Any ideas?
Along a similar vein, I can't go to the full page terminal (I don't know what its actually called) without the screen going weird. If I push ctrl+alt+F1 I get taken to the full page black/white text terminal area but everything is fuzzy and shaky. When I exit out of that and come back into gnome it remains shaky. It looks the same as switching users, so I would think any fix would take care of both these issues.
The other problem I have noticed doesn't cause me any serious headache other than its just weird. When I shut the computer down everything goes normal until it hits the splash shutdown screen, at which point the colors go out of sync and LOTS of fuzzy and shaking problems occur. Once the splash screen goes away I get presented with the 6 screens again which only have a blinking cursor for 1-2 seconds until the computer turns completely off. Any thoughts here?
THE FIX:I decided I should include what I did just in case anyone else with the same card (GeForce GT240M) has similar issues getting it to work with Ubuntu.
1. Installed ubuntu like normal (9.04) and installed the updates with the update manager.
2. I followed the instructions on this site to install the 190.25 drivers
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-inst...epidhardy.html3. Once they were installed I selected them and activated the driver under System >> Administration >> Hardware Drivers
4. Once they were active the computer asked for a restart. Before restarting I did the following (after writing down the instructions)
5. I pressed ctl+alt+F1 to get to the terminal
6. I stopped the xserver by typing
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sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
7. I then edited the xserver config file by typing (I would suggest making a backup before editing, something I didn't do)
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sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
8. Once in the editor I added the following line underneath the Devices section
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Option "ModeValidation" "NoTotalSizeCheck"
9. I saved the config file by pressing ctl+x and overwriting the file
10. Then I rebooted the computer and it worked.
If anyone has any advice on things I potentially did wrong or could have done better please let me know. Or if I made a glaring error in the above sequence that I forget I can change it.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be somewhat thorough. I'm still a pretty big newbie to linux, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it and loving it.
Thanks for the advice that got me this far, booting into just one account and doing normal computing works great!! and it looks wonderful.