Nvidia controls aren't in the GUI menus

My computer at home has an Nvidia graphics card, and it's running Ubuntu 8.10 at the moment. We have the living room set up as a combo family room/dining room/play space/study/office with an open layout and furniture sort of compartmentalizing the areas for each usage. We do not have cable TV, but we do have a nice TV/computer monitor that we watch movies and YouTube videos on. We pipe in all video content from the computer, whether it's from a DVD or from the Net. In order to make that work, we have the TV monitor set up as a secondary monitor plugged into the video card.

The problem: There was no GUI menu item for the Nvidia driver settings. The display settings that System->Preferences->ScreenResolution gives aren't the right thing at all.

The solution: You *may* have a link in System->Administration for Nvidia X-Server settings. If so, that's what you want. If not, open up a terminal window and type

gksudo nvidia-settings


It will ask you for your password, and then you can set up the secondary monitor as you like.

If you want to make that a selection in the System->Administration menu, right click on the word "System" in the top panel, then choose "edit menus". From there you can add a menu item for the above command.