'Generic' Driver for Ubuntu 9.04?

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I've already run into my first snag, and that's that the system board has an Nvidia N-force (not G-force, this is an older chip) 220.

When I first pulled up Ubuntu, I had a great display, but I couldn't go any smaller than 800x600 (beats Windows 'default' 640x480, tho....

I asked it to upgrade the driver, and it dutifully found the Nvidia site, but then proceeded to download a g-force driver. The result looks like 20 miles of bad road.

Went to Nvidia, and there's no N-force drivers for linux (cheapskates... but I did find a linux driver for the system board on the install CD (I never throw anything away..

Now -

First - is there a 'generic' driver that I can use (non-chip-specific) that will give me 1024x768 out there, or am I limited to Nvidia?

Second - would a 7-year-old linux driver work in Ubuntu?

Third- if the first 2 options don't work, how do I get back the original driver? Do I have to uninstall, reinstall, and how does one uninstall wubi?

Thanks. I've tried to join the Ubuntu forum, and it looks like Nvidia drivers are a pain anyway. If I have to, I'll just stick with the original driver.

The first release of ubuntu was version 4.10. we are currently at 9.04, and at 2 versions per year, Ubuntu is only about 5 years old. Seeing how it is based on debian which is uninterested in closed source drivers, I would say.. you are out of luck. 7 year old drivers for either are highly unlikely, and it predates when nvidia become linux friendly anyway.

Uninstalling wubi is done like uninstalling regular windows programs. Pretty easy to do. Rolling back the driver is pretty easy to do. If you know the name of it, find it in system>Administration>synaptic and right click, remove entirely. then apply. It should fall back to the generic driver.

Most nvidia drivers are not a pain. My brother went from a 8600gt to a 9800gt (up a generation) and I went from a 9800 to a gtx 250(up another generation). All three cards use the same driver.

You're probably better off buying a cheap 20 or 30 dollar video card. I had one of those NForce chipsets, those things suck even in windows.

This is a decent card on the AGP bus, which should be your bus. It has full linux driver support.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187044

Mmm...it's a thought. Just got it back in regular(default) driver. I might get a card later. To be honest, the stuff I need to do is command-line, anyway. Well, I've seen worse...

Just go and enable restricted drivers and use the package from there. The NVIDIA package there supports most all NVIDIA cards. I have a widescreen display using a NVIDIA card and am using 1440x900 with NO problems.