RE: Nvidia cards
> From: Patrick Wiseman [mailto:pwiseman@gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:49 PM
>
> 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
Only the legacy 173.xx kernel module is in non-free, even in Sid. If you
want the new 185.xx series, like for VDPAU for hardware-accelerated video
playback, you still need to do it the hard way, which still isn't very hard.
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