Nvidia Driver question

[natman2007]

I have an nvidia GForce go 7200 on my laptop, using the live CD i get three options for drivers does that mean im safe and good to go? I heard a lot about 8.10 and nivida drivers

[musta ruhtinas]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

i have a GeForce Go 7300 and i can tell you that though there are some issues with kde4.1, none is a showstopper.
all you need to install is the nvidia-glx-177 package available from the repositories.

[natman2007]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

Iis yours a laptop? if so what are the issues, on the live cd i can finally dim the screen brightness at will.

[srelysian]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

I actually mentioned this on another post somewhere, but I also had some initial issues with the onboard nvidia card on my pavillion laptop. It essentially required me to use VESA drivers when booting/installing the live cd. Which got me far enough in to get my wifi working, then install the nvidia 177(?) drivers. Everything runs like a dream now, I too can finally change the screen brightness. In fact, it does it itself if I unplug the power cord to save battery power.

[musta ruhtinas]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

Iis yours a laptop? if so what are the issues, on the live cd i can finally dim the screen brightness at will.

Yes, I have a Toshiba Satellite A200-14D.  And yes, the Fn keys work perfectly

The issues are minor, small rendering glitches - among others: artifacts and stuttering when resizing a few gtk apps (firefox especially), taskbar flickering when using OpenOffice, taskbar icons appearing and disappearing, folderview icon names clipping.
Happens with effects on, as well as off.
On my desktop (with an old ATI card) I experince significantly fewer problems.

[dibl]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

See the "Graphics Performance" paragraph here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F

However, I think the real problems are with the pre-5000 series cards that can't use the 177.80 driver. From the 8.10 release notes:

nVidia "legacy" video support

The 71 and 96 series of proprietary nVidia drivers, as provided by the nvidia-glx-legacy and nvidia-glx packages in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, are not compatible with the X.Org included in Ubuntu 8.10. Users with the nVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead. This driver does not support 3D acceleration.

Users of other nVidia chipsets that are supported by the 173 or 177 driver series will be transitioned to the nvidia-glx-173 or nvidia-glx-177 package instead. However, unlike drivers 96 and 71, drivers 173 and 177 are only compatible with CPUs that support SSE (e.g. Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon XP or higher). Systems with older CPUs will also be transitioned to the nv driver on upgrade.

[musta ruhtinas]

Re: Nvidia Driver question

See the "Graphics Performance" paragraph here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F

Very interesting reading, dibl, many thanks. I'll try some of the fixes in the following days and post the results.

Edit: nope, no improvement whatsoever; guess I have to wait for 4.2 alpha, or a new driver