Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager

When trying out an Ubuntu daily LiveCD yesterday I noticed the new Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager. This manager makes it incredibly easy to manage the binary blob drivers. By default are the ATI/AMD and NVIDIA drivers, and from there you can literally install the drivers almost instantly. It should be very nice for new users! In the Restricted Drivers Manager you can also manage the blobs for other hardware such as 802.11 WiFi cards with closed-source drivers, TV capture cards, and much more.

The Restricted Drivers Manager can be accessed in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn by going through the administration area.

For each driver entry there is a check box to enable the driver along with an area next to it to show whether the driver is actually in use.

When enabling the driver, there is a "warning" box that shows to make sure you know what you are doing. For both the ATI and NVIDIA driver it informs the user that it's for 3D support and 2D support with newer hardware, etc... Below is the message box for enabling the NVIDIA blob.

After enabling the support, I had restarted X, and to much surprise it had failed. It also showed that Feisty Fawn certainly doesn't sport a bullet proof X. X had failed to start after enabling the NVIDIA driver through the Restricted Drivers Manager. Another item that I feel should be addressed is making sure the appropriate hardware for each driver is installed before allowing the user to enable the driver. For example, I could have enabled both the ATI and NVIDIA drivers without any alerts from the Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager.

This is another small yet useful tool that can be found in Feisty Fawn. Tomorrow I'll be taking another look at migration-assistant.

Posted by Michael Larabel on March 17, 2007.