Video Drivers

If you have an advanced Video Card - (and it happens to be Nvidia or ATI) you can sometimes have trouble installing the drivers. Even if you don't have any troubles the process can be a bit much; even worse after you get done getting your video card setup a Kernel patch may come up and kill all your hard work.

A fast and easy way to install your Video drivers (again if they happen to be an Nvidia or ATI chip set) is to use a program called Envy. This can help you with your initial installation, and any time you have to reinstall because of a Kernel update - as well as keep your video drivers up-to-date.

In a terminal - run:

sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk

Then Launch EnvyNG's GUI (inside a Desktop Environment such as GNOME,KDE, etc.) by selecting it in the "Applications/System Tools" menu.

VirtualBox

Most of the time when you are running Ubuntu and the Kernel level gets upgraded the "virtualbox-ose-module-generic" does not get upgraded.

And so when you try to run VirtualBox you get the error "VirtualBox kernel driver not installed" or something related.

(This can also happen the first time you run VirtualBox on a new (but fully patched) install.)

To fix this run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-source
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i virtualbox-ose
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv restart