nvidia binary drivers

[Philip Muskovac]

On 02/22/2011 10:49 PM, Patrick Goetz wrote:
> On 02/22/2011 06:00 AM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> Patrick Goetz [2011-02-21 14:41 -0600]:
>>> > Does the feature freeze include updating binary drivers?
>> In principle yes, but as the current nvidia/fglrx drivers in Natty are
>> totally broken (they are currently not available for the current X.org
>> ABI), they will be updated by the end of the release (assuming that
>> there will be a new compatible upstream release up to that point).
>>
>
> That's strange -- there's no mention of this on the nvidia linux amd64
> driver page:
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-260.19.36-driver.html
>
> are you sure that 260.19.36 is broken as well for x.org 1.10?
>

the newly released [1] 270.29 beta driver is the first driver to support 
x-server 1.10 as documented on the release page. It's available in the 
x-updates PPA and soon in the archive for natty.

> While on the subject, the package naming scheme for the nvidia binary
> drivers doesn't make any sense to me:
>
> --------------------------
> Package nvidia-173-kernel-source
> * natty (misc): Transitional package for nvidia-glx-173-kernel-source
> [restricted]
> 173.14.28-0ubuntu4: amd64 i386
>
> Package nvidia-180-kernel-source
> * natty (misc): Transitional package for nvidia-glx-185-kernel-source
> [restricted]
> 185.18.36-0ubuntu9: amd64 i386
>
> Package nvidia-185-kernel-source
> * natty (misc): Transitional package for nvidia-glx-185-kernel-source
> [restricted]
> 260.19.29-0ubuntu1: amd64 i386
> --------------------------
>
>
> Huh? Things seem to have gone off the rail around version 180 and then
> got progressively worse. Any chance the package naming scheme can be
> rendered sensible, at least for the newest drivers?

As you can see the packages are *transitional* packages. The current 
naming scheme is:

nvidia-96: legacy support (96.43.17-ubuntu1)
nvidia-173: legacy support (173.14.28-0ubuntu4)
nvidia-current: newest available driver at release time (currently 
260.19.29-0ubuntu1 for natty and soon 270.29)

Philip

[1] http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=159990