Installing System76 Driver on elementary OS

So, you get a nice and shining System76 machine and decide to use elementary on it. You plug in your USB, go through the installer and finally reboot to your brand new system but there’s something missing, some things are not working as they should or at least not as good as they should be. You remember then that the Ubuntu shipped with your computer had this System76 app which you may not know but it took care of all the needed drivers, tweaks and even added some wallpapers for your computer to be the awesome machine it was meant to be.

So, how do you get the System76 Driver app on elementary OS (Or pretty much any Ubuntu derivative)? Luckily for us, System76 keeps a Launchpad Repository from which you can get the Driver so let’s get started.

First, if you are using elementary then you need to install the software-properties-common package which provides us the ability of adding external repositories for software installation. It is not provided on elementary due to design and simplicity purposes but we’ll actually need it so to install it just run:

sudo apt install software-properties-common

Now that we’ve done that, we can proceed to the driver installation:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:system76-dev/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install system76-driver

Let’s take a look at what that code does, the first line adds the repository itself to our sources, second line updates the package information our system has and then the third line finally installs the System76 Driver.

If your system has a NVIDIA GPU, then you’ll also need to install the NVIDIA driver with the following command:

sudo apt install system76-driver-nvidia

Once installed, the driver will make all the needed tweaks and once finished you’ll have to reboot your system in order for changes to take effect. You can also open the app by searching on Slingshot for it, it will prompt for your password and then show you a screen like this one.

There you’ll be able to check some details and even create Log Files so you can send them to them in a Support Ticket if you ever have any trouble and that’s it, you’ve made it!

You can also check their official support page for more details: http://support.system76.com/articles/restore/ Remember that while this tutorial was made for elementary OS, you can install the driver in pretty much the same way on any Ubuntu derivative so you can take the most out of you computer.