Installation report: Ubuntu desktop Alpha 3 amd64 - my turn

[Alberto Milone]

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 16:22 -0300, Adilson Oliveira wrote:
> After the first boot my nvidia card was correctly detected and I was
> given the chance to install 3 different versions of the same proprietary
> driver. I'm not sure this is the way it should be. Is there any reason
> for that?

Sometimes a graphics card is supported by multiple versions of the
NVIDIA driver. In your case your card is supported by 3 out of 4 driver
versions (177, 173, 96).

While I agree with the idea that only one driver should be recommended,
I'm still convinced that users should be able to select a different
(compatible) driver if they experience problems with the recommended
driver (such cases are not unusual).

Jockey is not 100% complete therefore what you experienced should change
in the final release.

Here is what I suggest, which reflects part of what we do during
dist-upgrades (with "nvidia-common") from Hardy to Intrepid. If
multiple versions of the driver support the same card we should show all
the compatible drivers and highlight - in some intuitive way - the
recommended version.

In order to determine what the recommend version is, we can follow this
pattern (as "nvidia-common" does for dist-upgrades):

if more than one card is available, the recommended driver should be the
one which supports all these cards. For example if you had a geforce
5500 (compatible with 173, 96, 71) and a geforce 7700 (compatible with
177, 173, 96), version 173 would be the recommended one.

If no such driver can be found or if only one card is available we can
simply select the compatible driver with the highest version.

>  Anyway, I selected the latest one and it was installed but the
> download bar didn't update during the process, staying at 0% the whole
> time which made me wonder for a minute if it was really downloading and
> installing the driver.

This is something which is still WIP in Jockey.

> 3) I see some glitches in the windows bars with compiz enabled. It may
> disappear or have the buttons shifted a bit to the left when selected.

It might be a bug in the NVIDIA driver. I will update the NVIDIA driver
(the "173" flavour) to 173.14.12 ASAP.

Regards,

Alberto Milone