Do I need root privilege to enable restricted drivers?

Hi folks,

I have a Dell Optiplex 630 desktop with Ubuntu 8.10 at work (yes, it is a desktop not a laptop, but it still suits these forums, sorry mods). It has been running with generic drivers for its Nvidia card. That has been no hassle for me, but recently I've been needing to analyze some complicated 3D figures in MATLAB, zooming in and out and rotating them. It is painfully slow.

I know there are restricted drivers available, but have no clue how to enable them. I had a little icon on the Gnome Panel that warned me of that, tried to enable them, and the "enable restricted drivers" dialog just hung. Now that icon doesn't show up anymore.

Is there any way to enable these drivers even though I have no administrative privileges (even if only for my user account, of course)? And is there any way to do so using the terminal? (I'm inexperienced with Ubuntu, sorry about that)

Thanks in advance fellas.

 

No, there's no way to enable them without admin privileges. Get your sysadmin to do it... it's really pretty trivial.

Basically you just need to "apt-get install nvidia-glx-180" as a root or root-privileged user and it'll pull everything else you need.

 

Yeah, I figured, but thought I'd still ask.

Thanks for the quick reply

 

Do you have your own user account and password?
Unless it was changed, Ubuntu enables users to become superusers(with admin privledges) using the "sudo [command]" in terminal.

 

But wouldn't I need to have one account with root privilege to begin with? I do have my own account, but it doesn't have root.

 

A user account in linux can use sudo to issue commands that allows them to run programs with the security privileges of another user (normally the superuser, aka. root), as long as they are configured to do so in the /etc/sudoers configuration file.

As previously noted, Ubuntu's default configuration is to configure user accounts with sudo privileges, so that any Ubuntu user can issue sudo commands by running the sudo program followed by the command. The typical sudo configuration is to require that the user enter in their own password before running the command. OSX is another OS which is configured the same way.

BTW, if you're not configured to run sudo commands in the /etc/sudoers configuration file, you will need an account with superuser, or root, privileges in order to edit the file.

Good Luck..

 

Oh OK. (Linux noobness sucks doesn't it?)

I'll try that immediately.

 

You can try running gksu jockey-gtk.

 

I tried sudo-ing my way into doing these changes, and I got a message that said something like "You are not in the sudo-ers list. This incident will be reported."

Oh yeah?? BRING IT ON B**** !!

Seriously now, I'll just ask the admins to do it. But I laughed quite hard at the message, made me feel like a teenage rebel again.

 

lol!

tell your noob admins to nano /etc/sudoers and fix the problem! haha

 

The admins have fixed it now.

 

Good to hear Just as an FYI, the "sudoers" group is like the Admin group in Windows. If you aren't in the right group (since you have a sysadmin, I'd bet he doesn't want the users to be able to muck about with hardware or system settings much), you don't get the privileges. I should have made that clearer. On a normal install where you are your own administrator, your user is part of the sudoers group, so your password would allow you to make those changes.