Comment 73 for bug 728745

John,

Have you tried the open source Nouveau drivers? They have been (mostly) working for me with Ubuntu 11.04 amd64 desktop with a nVidia Corporation G72 [GeForce 7300 LE] (rev a1). unity is working, so "effects" are working.

I had difficulty installing the Nouveau drivers, because the gui "Additional Drivers" program only listed nVidia drivers and merely installing the Nouveau drivers from synaptic or apt-get does not enable them.

Here's what worked for me, mostly from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1423210:

1. Install libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental. (You need this.)

I also added ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates to my repositories and updated my system. I'm not sure that this is necessary.

Open the terminal and type the following commands:
Code:

sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf

(and select the alternative provided by mesa)

(Here's what I see on my machine:

mikey@hatshepsut:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf
[sudo] password for mikey:
There are 3 choices for the alternative gl_conf (providing /etc/ld.so.conf.d/GL.conf).

  Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf 9700 auto mode
* 1 /usr/lib/mesa/ld.so.conf 500 manual mode
  2 /usr/lib/nvidia-173/ld.so.conf 9620 manual mode
  3 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf 9700 manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: )

Code:

sudo ldconfig
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_old

and restart your computer.

After running update-alternatives -- config gl_conf, the open source drivers now appear in "Additonal Drivers". they are listed as " Experimental 3D support for nVidia Cards".