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Re: Graphics cards with Free drivers

Lennart Sorensen wrote:

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 07:54:43AM +0200, Heikki Levanto wrote:

Thanks, and sorry for being dense, but when you say 'the 196 driver' (or 1xx
driver, as you say in your howto), what should I be getting. I seem to be
unable to find any debian packages with that number in it.

You have a nice table that explains how to substitute
'nvidia-kernel-legacy-71xx-source' for 'nvidia-kernel-source' for an old
card, but I can't make anything similar to work no matter where I plug in the
magical 169. Obviously I am doing something wrong here...


169 is the current one.  No substitution required.  Actually it is current
on unstable (and probably testing).  Stable was released a long time ago
when 8776 was current.  This is why Etch can't support new cards, the
driver is simply too old.
The plain sudo m-a a-i -i -t -f nvidia-kernel-source 
gets to the compile errors I reported earlier.


Are you running Etch, Lenny or Sid?  Are you running the Debian kernel
that came with it?

If you install a 2.6.24 kernel on Etch, then you won't be able to
compile the nvidia driver since the one in Etch doesn't work with
kernels much newer than 2.6.18 that Etch uses.

That is one big problem with nvidia - my laptop needs a more recent
kernel than that in order to have sound and wifi. So
I use 2.6.25 with a wifi patch now, and with luck that patch will
go into 2.6.26 so I can run a standard kernel again. Perhaps
nvidia catch up someday. Anyway, the 3D effects in xlockmore is not
too heavy to run in software.
The worst part of nvidia is the occational lockup though. A surprise freeze or two a 
week is definitely too much - the machine runs stable without nvidia. :-/
I heard about this older version of the driver that didn't freeze up. Took some effort to find it and downgrade X. It was much better, but eventually it too hung 
the machine.

Helge Hafting
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