Proprietary drivers - how?

Peter_S · 1 Mar 2012 at 19:36

Playing with ubuntu 11 in a VM to get a feel for it. It was working OK but no transparency or fancy 3D goodness. So I thought I'd install the proprietary driver........................

Cannot for the life of me work out how to install the proprietary driver for the M8900 Firepro graphics card.

I can find the hardware driver icon and it tells me I have no proprietary drivers installed, no options to install one either. I have the fglrx file from Ati, cant seem to run it.

I've spent all afternoon on google and the ubuntu forums (which I find largely baffling) with no joy; I cant get the -ing thing to work properly. :mad:

Anyone know of or can do a "muppets guide" to what should be a
simple task?

(M6600 Win 7, Virtual box VM Ubuntu 11 / PinguyOS)

Cheers

Bigsy · 1 Mar 2012 at 20:18

Proprietary graphics driver inside a VM? Thats not gonna work I'm afraid mate.

Still 3d will work, first remove what you have installed already (if anything graphics related), then make sure you have 3d acceleration (and 2d for that matter) ticked in virtualbox display settings and give it a decent about of video memory, also make sure you have guest additions installed. You should see the virtualbox graphics driver under 'additional drivers' in ubuntu.

Do that and you should have 3d.

jack.mitchell · 1 Mar 2012 at 21:48

Bigsy is right. Virtualbox does not expose the graphics hardware to the Guest Operating System, it 'emulates' it's own graphics card. If you were to install Linux directly on your hardware then the graphics icon would allow you to install the proprietry divers.

Peter_S · 2 Mar 2012 at 06:47

Thanks for the explanations (facepalms self for not even thinking about the problem that way......................)

Understanding creeps up a notch until the next time!

inSilica · 2 Mar 2012 at 09:23

jack.mitchell said:
Bigsy is right. Virtualbox does not expose the graphics hardware to the Guest Operating System, it 'emulates' it's own graphics card. If you were to install Linux directly on your hardware then the graphics icon would allow you to install the proprietry divers.

emmm maybe so for virtualbox, have you looked at VMWare and VT-D? I have a mate playing games in a windows VM under VMWare using VT-D ...
maybe watch Xen in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHUwg_zxYgw

Your Processor / + / Chip-set needs to support VT-D, or it's a no go