Hey everyone! I hope you're all doing well. I've got an older PC that runs Windows 10, but it's pretty frustrating to use. I've enjoyed Linux in virtual machines on my laptop, so I want to install a Linux distro like Mint or Arch on my old machine. The only issue is that it has a GT610 graphics card, and I can't seem to find any compatible drivers for it on Linux. I'm not looking to upgrade the GPU since I have a decent laptop for more intensive tasks. I'd appreciate any advice you have on this. Thanks!
5 Answers
Honestly, the GT610 is pretty much obsolete and doesn’t have much support anymore. You might be able to find an older version of Ubuntu that gives you some support, but honestly, Windows would probably work better if you're looking for stability with that card.
Have you tried using the Drivers app on Mint? Just click on the kicker, type 'driv', and select it. It should load the appropriate driver for your hardware, and then a reboot should get everything working smoothly.
Can you share your hardware specs? Like the make/model of your CPU and RAM? If you run `watch -n 1 nvidia-smi` in your terminal, it should show whether your card is detected and in use. Mint should have at least installed some version of the drivers when you set it up.
For such an old card, you're probably okay with the built-in kernel driver. The Nouveau driver that comes by default works fine typically. But yeah, Nvidia hasn’t supported the GT610 for ages, so it’s pretty much stuck with Nouveau in Linux anyway.
You generally don't need to manually install drivers for most graphics cards on Linux. Distributions like Mint and Arch usually come with open-source drivers included in the kernel.
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