On 2010-03-16 09:46, Stephen Powell wrote:
On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:20:13 -0400 (EDT), Ron Johnson wrote:On 2010-03-15 22:08, Stephen Powell wrote:Or the (what's that hissing noise coming from Boston?) nvidia binary driver. Lots of people hate it, it's not perfect (but darn it if there's not a single non-trivial perfect FLOSS system out there either!), and they regularly drop support for older chips, but where the rubber hits the road, it works [...] better than the nv driver.Another possibility is to install the xserver-xorg-video-nv package from unstable, which is newer and *might* support your chipset.Yes, the proprietary nvidia binary driver is another possibility. It's great when it works, but it breaks often with maintenance to X or the kernel.
That's the beauty of compiling my own kernel from linux-source-2.6.xx and installing nvidia from upstream: for months on end, I've got a stable kernel and video.
Using Sid does mean, though, that occasionally I must go into /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions and mv the xserver-xorg-core libglx.so out of the way (usually to "libglx.so.software") and then symlink nvidia's libglx.so.XXX.YY to libglx.so. That, too, is rare, and only a little bit of manual intervention.
Best of all, when it *does* break, you can always go back to nv until it's fixed. Woo hoo! Ain't choice great!Except in this case, nv doesn't work. He would have to fall back to VESA, which is not only slower, but does not support his monitor's full resolution.
Suffering is good for the soul! -- Obsession with "preserving cultural heritage" is a racist impediment to moral, physical and intellectual progress.