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It was just eleven days ago that NVIDIA had released the 180.11 Beta Linux Driver, but in the wee hours of Saturday morning NVIDIA has pushed out a new beta driver. This driver contains a few fixes, support for new GPUs, and an updated implementation of the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix.
It was just two weeks ago that NVIDIA had introduced the 100.14.09 display driver, but today we have another new Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD driver out from the green binary camp. The NVIDIA 100.14.11 display driver adds support for their new GeForce 7 integrated graphics, fixes console restoration problems, and improves some other areas of their Linux (as well as FreeBSD and Solaris) driver.
The larger Linux distros now allow the user to download and install the Nvidia accelerated driver directly from repositories. While this is convienent, we tend to lose perspective as to the details of the driver package. It's the old case of "load first and read the documentation later, if ever". This article supplies an overview of the driver package as supplied by Nvidia.
Nvidia, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, released a new beta of its Linux video driver, version 173.08, which introduces support for some GeForce 9800, 9600, 9500 and 8400 graphic cards, among other bugfixes and improvements.
Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler, merged in the 2.6.23-rc1 release, if you drive your Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I guess that's what we get for running binary drivers.
"Envy" is an application for Ubuntu and Debian written in Python and PyGTK which will: detect the model of your graphic card, download the right version of the proprietary driver for your ATI or Nvidia card from ATI or Nvidia's websites, handle the dependencies required to build the module, install/uninstall the driver, set up your xorg.conf for you, and then restart the Xserver for you.
KDE 4.1 was released as a RC recently and will soon be released. While it will be a very usable and stable desktop environment ready to be used almost everywhere most users with NVIDIA cards will not be pleased: their proprietary driver spoil the fun.
The NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and 6150 integrated graphics processors have been relatively popular among Linux and Windows users. These IGPs have been common in HTPC setups with the NVIDIA driver working out well with MythTV.
