I Jumped the Gun

I was planning to wait until the official release of Ubuntu 7.04, but I couldn't. So I've installed 7.04 beta onto my home PC will all my music. It's a dual-boot setup, so I can either load up ubuntu or Windows XP if I want. The main issue with my home PC is my video card, since it needs the official Nvidia drivers rather than the free unofficial drivers. The free drivers won't output signal to my TV, so I have to plug in an extra computer monitor during the installation. Luckily, ubuntu 7.04 includes a "Restricted Drivers" application to check for necessary drivers. It identified my video card and automatically downloaded and installed the official Nvidia drivers. But that didn't start TV-out right away. Although there's not control panel that I could find, I could type

nvidia-settings

In the terminal to open the Nvidia control panel. I disabled the monitor and enabled TV-out with a slightly lower screen resolution (so that I can actually read text on the TV). Everything works great now, and it was so easy. You can check in the archives of this blog to see how difficult it was to enable TV-out last time I tried ubuntu.

The other cool thing is that Ubuntu 7.04 automatically mounts all available hard drives, which was something I had trouble with last time I tried. All my music and movies are on my second hard drive, and that showed up on my ubuntu desktop automatically.