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Re: Nvidia cards

Hello List,

you can find the new 185.xx series in Sid.

hth,
Jerome

Patrick Wiseman wrote:

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




--
Jerome BENOIT
jgmbenoit_at_mailsnare_dot_net
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