Linux developers demand open drivers, docs and development processes, NVIDIA refuses to open their drivers, arguing that the technical quality is not a problem, and that the driver contains intellectual property they wish to protect. ATI/AMD has shown the intellectual property argument is at least not universally applicable to graphics hardware. Let's also clear up a misconception about the technical quality of closed NVIDIA drivers.

Currently, GNU/Linux users with Nvidia graphics cards have two choices: Either use the proprietary drivers and violate their free software principles, or use the free nv driver and do without 3-D acceleration. The Nouveau project is working to overcome this dilemma by producing its own set of fully functional free Nvidia drivers.

Graphics drivers (for X11 under whatever Free Software operating system you care to use) are one area where Free Software has plenty of room for improvement. My laptop has an nVidia GeForce 9600M in it, which means that there are two drivers I can use for it: the Free Software nv driver, or the proprietary nvidia one.

On May 28th, 2008, NVidia decided to please the Linux world and launched version 173.14.05 of their graphics drivers, which brought preliminary support for X.org Server 1.5 (used in bleeding-edge distributions, such as Fedora 9). A few days ago, they decided to make the Linux users happy again, by releasing yet another bugfix version of their graphics drivers, Nvidia 173.14.09.

It's been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though -- on the same day as NVIDIA's OpenCL driver launch for Windows -- they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

The NVIDIA 180.22 Linux driver was released less than three weeks ago, but today NVIDIA has released a new 180.xx display driver update. In addition, NVIDIA has updated all three of their legacy display drivers.

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property.

Why install this driver?

Your NVIDIA video card will work on your Fedora 11 box without this driver, however if you want to enable the 3D acceleration (if you want to use Compiz Fsuion) you need to install it.
Which driver to use?

The latest nvidia driver: This is a proprietary driver that works with newer nvidia cards.

The latest NVIDIA drivers are 177 in the repos. This causes a bug with the new Intrepid Kernel causing the window title bars on some systems to draw incorrectly. It tends to be an intermittent problem. This is a temporary fix using the NVIDIA 180.08 beta drivers.