Re: Nvidia cards
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Kevin Ross<kevin@familyross.net> wrote:
>> 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.
I was unaware of that. I'm not sure I need the extra functionality,
but it's nice to know it's there in case.
Patrick
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