Re: Nvidia cards
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith
Jr.<bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 August 2009 16:52:06 Jeff H. wrote:
>> Been thinking of switching to Debian. Does it support Nvidia laptop cards?
>
> The "nv" X11 driver is in the Offical Free-Software-Only Debian package
> repository. I think the "nouveau" X11 driver is also being packaged by a DD
> but is not in, or scheduled to be in any release of Debian.
>
> The "nvidia" X11 driver and the kernel module of the same name are part of the
> non-free repository. These packages are second-class citizens; their closed-
> source nature makes it impossible to resolve non-packaging issues within
> Debian.
>
> Packages in Official Stable Debian do not get upgraded to new version from
> upstream, so it will not include the latest release from NVidia. In addition,
> the kernel module is not always kept in sync with the latest kernel, so you
> may need to compile that yourself. There are helper scripts and source
> packages available.
While this used to be the case, I think it is no longer so (although
I'm on testing, not stable). There is now a package for the nividia
kernel and module which keeps everything in sync; I have not had to
recompile the kernel to catch up with the nvidia module in a very long
time. And it works very nicely.
Patrick
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