Message for dibl et al about the new nvidia drivers

[technogran]

Dear dibl, as I tend to regard you as a bit of an expert on here when it comes to the subject of setting up the nvidia drivers, and I know that you have been trying to help me personally, thought I would share this with you.
I think that the newest nvidia drivers might (and here I have no proof, just me gut feeling) the ones introduced since xmas or thereabouts, might not be suiting my graphics card which as stated elsewhere is a 7300Geforce LE.
Yesterday I went on the Nvidia site to check which driver I should be installing for my card in Linux. It is the 169.09 driver, and I think that some of these newest drivers have a problem (or are not compatable with my card as all my diplay/driver probs have really kicked in since just before xmas.

Why I have come to this conclusion is that back in Mint, let Envy install the latest driver (tried to do it manually as well, but 169.09 was not in the list of drivers that Envy offered) but my display etc gets borked in that as well. There has been an update of nvidia drivers recently, but I can't think of any other reason why I can't update my driver without borking the display.

TG

[Beren Camlost]

Re: Message for dibl et al about the new nvidia drivers

While this is partially off topic, I thought I'd chime in with my gut feelings too.

I have noticed on my Windows system that newer nVidia drivers are fairly unstable compared to older ones. To the point where I downgraded to an 18 month old version or so, in order to run all my preferred games smoothly. I find it odd since I have a 7800GT, though admittedly it's two years old..

While I'm by far more happy with the later linux drivers from nVidia, I tend to go with the proprietary nVidia drivers from the repository.

[dibl]

Re: Message for dibl et al about the new nvidia drivers

Hmmmmmmmmm.

@TG, thank you for the vote of confidence -- I'm not really expert at anything but getting my own rig running -- not sure what it means that I've repeated the experience so many times ....

I dunno -- I swapped out my 7900GS card (which was running fine in Gutsy with the 100.14.19 driver) for a new 8800GTS in December, and of course they released the 169-series driver around that same time. The 8000-series cards are clearly more difficult to get running with Linux KDM and GDM -- Ubuntu Forum is full of posts from users with problems. It mainly seems to be the handling of the *buntu splash screens with the default Linux kernel boot options. Once the kernel boot options are either minimized or revised to more agreeable ones (pci=nomce, vga=791, xdrvr=fbdrv, etc.), the new cards work great.

My anecdotal observation is that folks with the 7950 cards seem to have an inordinate amount of problems -- I suspect there's something in that design that the new drivers aren't handling quite right.

For your other 7000-series cards, it is possible that Nvidia's claims of backward compatibility for the 169.09 driver are exaggerated. I was just reviewing their web site, and it's easy enough to grab one of their archived drivers, if you want it, from here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_archive.html

While it's not exactly a trivial thing to remove one driver and install another, it's not rocket science either. If I were you TG, maybe it's worth spending an hour to see what happens if you download and install the 100.14.19 driver. I think that the instructions here:

http://albertomilone.com/latest_nvidia_udsf_feisty.html

will work, even though they were written for Feisty -- I don't there were any real "architectural" changes in Gutsy that would spoil the guide's accuracy.

Another (and substantially easier) thing to try would be (assuming you have the nvidia-glx-new package installed) to use Adept to remove nvidia-glx-new and install the nvidia-glx package instead. If it works better after you restart X, then hey, you're done. If not, well, it was an easy thing to try and you can start reviewing Mr. Milone's guidance.

[technogran]

Re: Message for dibl et al about the new nvidia drivers

Dear dibl, we seem to have got at cross purposes again! What I meant was that for my test rig with the 7300geforce LE card, now that I have managed to install (via Envy in GG) this 169 driver, everything is peachy and running okay.
It was the other drivers previous to this that were causing problems, the fan in particular was over running and when installed, I couldn't use any browsers as if I scrolled in them they crashed the whole computer. In Linux Mint when I tried to install a driver, the 169 one was not available, the latest WAS the 100, and its that (and I think the previous one to that) which seemed to be causing problems.

I am okay now, this latest one seems to have solved everything.

TG

[dibl]

Re: Message for dibl et al about the new nvidia drivers

Oh, great! I thought you were still having problems with that 7300LE -- glad it's working right!