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.

Yeah, but what do you do if it fails? Every time I load Ubuntu after installing ATI drivers, I get the black screen of death and have to reload Ubuntu. (This happens no matter how I load the drivers, by the way.)

I had the blackscreen. I got rid of it by booting into recovery mode from grub, typing 'apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx' and 'dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg', then rebooting.

Hello all...I was wondering about this restricted driver manager? I dont even have it listed in my admin section at all. Does anyone know how to fix it or put it there.Thanks a lot in advance for your help. UBUNTU ROCKS!!!!!

there are no drivers in the restricted drivers manager...

what shall i do????

please help...:(

Quick question for all, I just installed ubuntu 8.1 desktop on a dell 700m and under system/administration there is no "restricted drivers manager" listed. Running sudo aptitue install restricted-manager lists 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Anyone have a suggestion to help? As apparently I need to be in restricted-manager to get my wireless nic card working (Broadcom 43xx)

Thanks

same thing for me. first used envy to install my ati drivers, but messed up. now i only got vga output on my screen. driver manager sounds good, but even before i messed up my drivers the window was always empty. what is the point, please could anybody give us something to work on. why started all this? finally i want to enable my s-vhs output with my radeon 9000. google gives me a lot related sites but nothing fits me...

gruss targa

When I first installed Gutsy 7.10 Server with ubunu-desktop, everything worked fine. The Restricted Drivers Manager was working and my Broadcom bcm4318 wireless was working.
Now the Restricted Drivers Manager won't work and I can't get my wireless working.

When something works fine, why break it?

This is stupid.