As a long-time (since Gutsy) follower of Ubuntu bug 99508, the one about the badly drawn window decoration (see right), I was thrilled to see that Nvidia’s 180 Beta driver fixed the problem. The driver is packaged up and available in the alpha of Jaunty’s next release, 9.04. However, running the alpha as your main OS is folly, not to mention a pain in the butt if you just want to get something done and it’s a bit broken at that moment.

One can always install nvidia’s driver from a shell using the installer provided, but I’m always happier using a .deb, and luckily the 180 debs are coming to Intrepid’s backports. Just not yet. So if you want to try the 180 driver, you can use the Jaunty .debs.

I’ve tested it on my laptop under Intrepid, with its integral Nvidia 6100 Go chipset, and it works very well. Some Jaunty testers have reported increased temperatures and odd black spots, but all is ok here. In fact I ran a full screen video on each desktop under compiz (left) without issue.
The debs are available from the Jaunty repos, and the packages required are nvidia-glx-180 and nvidia-180-kernel-source. At present, these contain the 180.11 beta driver – there is a newer one available from nvidia and no doubt the packages in the Jaunty repos will be updated shortly. Once downloaded, a few commands (i386 users will need to alter the architecture part of the filename):

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-glx-177
cd Desktop (if this is where the debs are)
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-180-kernel-source_180.11-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-glx-180_180.11-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb


And a reboot and (fingers x!) you’re done