7/19/2007

nvidia-drivers updates

Cardoe wrote this in the early afternoon:

Well some people might have noticed that nvidia-drivers have gotten some tweaks over the past 2 weeks. I’ve descended after being frustrated that my new 8600GT wasn’t supported in Gentoo. The issue arose from the fact that nVidia has decided to maintain 2 legacy series of drivers, the 71xx series and the 96xx series. Originally when they had announced the 71xx series as legacy, those drivers were renamed to nvidia-legacy-drivers and everything was fine. But now with 2 sets the naming gets confusing.  So the following ebuilds have been added to the tree:

  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.7185
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9639
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-100.14.09
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-100.14.11 (some users are having issues with these freezing so 09 is available)

Now people will notice that this will cause problems for users that have for example a GeForce 4 video card since Portage will attempt to install the highest version, which would be 100.14.11, but that version does not support the GeForce 4. This is where a new eclass, nvidia-driver.eclass, that does some lspci magic to check for which nVidia chipset you have and recommend which drivers you should add to your mask file.

The other change people will notice is that if you have USE=gtk, it will pull in nvidia-settings which allow you to tweak your video card settings while X is running as well as pull certain information from you card (i.e. GPU temp). The drivers also install nvidia-xconfig which will assist in configuring your xorg.conf file, this change makes nvidia-drivers behave more like ati-drivers. And lastly, amd64 users will be happy to know the ebuild respect multilib settings now so it will pull in the right packages for the 32 bit driver so that revdep-rebuild is now happy.

71xx series users must take note that the name of the driver has changed from nvidia-legacy-drivers back to nvidia-drivers and it should remain that way for the life of the drivers.

If you have any questions or issues, feel free to ping me or submit a bug to bugzilla.

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