Installing nVidia 3d Vision on Ubuntu 11.10

We are using the nVidia 3d Vision to visualize crystal structures, etc. in Coot and Pymol and it turns out to be NOT TRIVIAL to get this set up. I'm putting this together as a reference however the particulars will clearly depend on Ubuntu version and your specific graphics card model.

A later post will describe installing all of the crystallography programs soup-to-nuts on Ubuntu.

My setup:

Ubuntu 64 bit 11.10 

nVidia Quadro FX 3800
nVidia 3d Vision Kit (emitter, glasses, HD monitor)
Homemade cable 3-pin mini DIN cable (see http://www.zib.de/durmaz/3dVision.html)

Using additional drivers, use the recommended current nvidia driver (for me 280.13).  If you had a clean install and you allowed third party drivers, it should already be installed and functioning.

3d hardware stereo requires disabling composite, which happens to be essential for running the Unity desktop.  We will install the gnome fallback shell:

sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback

We also want to install a simple test that hardware stereo is functioning:

sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

Restart your computer and at the login select GNOME-classic (No Effects) as your login shell (click on the gear icon next to your user name).

The final step is to edit your xorg.conf file to enable stereo.  If you've never adjusted anything with the nvidia-settings or nvidia-xconfig it is first easiest to make sure nvidia has written the xorg.conf.  By default Ubuntu always installs a pretty paltry xorg.conf on my computer.

If you need to generate an xorg.conf, type in a terminal:

nvidia-settings

Click on "X Server Display Configuration" and then in the lower right, "Save to X Configuration File".  You now have a nvidia generated xorg.conf.

Close and back in the terminal we will enable stereo by typing:

sudo nvidia-xconfig -stereo=10

It should say that it needed to disable composite.  If there is any error in writing to either /etc/X11 or xorg.conf you can try to manually make them writable using:

sudo chmod a+w /etc/X11/xorg.conf

For reference my final xorg.conf file now looks like this:

(pending!)

Restart your computer.  If everything went well the IR emitter should be steady faintly green.  If it is faint blinking red, the video card driver isn't working properly.

Assuming the IR emitter is faint green, open a terminal and type:

glxgears -stereo

The IR emitter should be BRIGHT green and you should see quad buffered stereo on the screen, put on the glasses and enjoy.