Envy NG, Automatic Proprietary Driver Installation

Many users have difficulties compiling proprietary drivers for their graphics cards when the Operating System doesn’t recognize them. ATI cards are even more complicated, since most Nvidia cards are already recognized by most OS.

But as with everything in this world, there’s a solution! To help these desperate souls, there’s Envy NG! A friendly program that installs proprietary drivers for graphics cards (Nvidia and ATI) without any effort from the user.

To install Envy on Debian-like distributions, type:

sudo aptitude install envyng-gtk

You can choose between the graphical version (envyng-gtk), the Qt version for KDE (envyng-qt), or just command line (envyng-core). I recommend the graphical version.

Right after, run Envy as root:

sudo envyng -g

If you prefer, you can run in text mode:

sudo envyng -t

The cool thing about Envy NG is that it does everything automatically. It identifies your graphics card, checks compatibility, downloads the most suitable driver and configures everything for you. It supports NVIDIA cards (GeForce 6000+ series, Quadro, ION) and ATI/AMD (Radeon HD, FirePro and FGLRX drivers).

The process is quite simple: it backs up the current driver, downloads the new one, safely removes the old one, installs the new one and configures Xorg.conf. If something goes wrong, you can go back to the previous driver.

If installation fails, check the logs at /var/log/envyng.log, update repositories with apt-get update and try again. Sometimes it helps to try text mode if the graphical interface doesn’t work.

If the driver doesn’t work after installation, restart the system (always necessary). If the screen goes black, use recovery mode to return to previous settings.

To see if it worked, you can test:

# For NVIDIA
nvidia-smi

# For ATI/AMD
fglrxinfo

# Test OpenGL
glxinfo | grep rendering

If everything is working, you should be able to adjust resolution, configure multiple monitors and have full 3D acceleration.

Always backup before messing with drivers. If your card is already working well, no need to mess with it. Envy NG is most useful when you’re having compatibility or performance issues.

For more recent Ubuntu users, you can also try sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall which is even simpler.

Envy NG is a very useful tool that solves one of the biggest problems in Linux adoption: installing proprietary drivers. For those with problematic ATI or NVIDIA cards, it’s practically indispensable.