Nvidia Driver naming: confused

Leo Noordhuizen leo.noordhuizen at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 18:31:05 UTC 2012


Liam, Avi,

Thanks for your extensive answers and confirmation what I suspected.
I think this is one of those 'places' which might need some
improvement/crlarification, as an enduser will really get confused about
this.

Thanks, Leo

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:

> Leo Noordhuizen wrote:
> > I am running UBUNTU 11.10 with a Nvidia based graphics card.
> > Over the past time (years ?) I have seen discussions about the nv and
> > 'nouveau' drivers.
>
> There are three drivers available for NVidia cards:
>
> 'nv' is a very basic open source driver produced by NVidia essentially
> in order to make the graphics card work by enough that the proprietary
> NVidia driver can be installed. It supports very basic 2D graphics and
> nothing else.
> Historically, this is the default driver used for NVidia chipsets on
> fresh installs.
>
> 'The NVidia binary driver' is the 'proper' driver released by NVidia,
> supporting all the features of the card like 3D acceleration and
> multi-monitor support. It's not free-as-in-freedom so cannot be
> shipped as part of the default install - it needs to be installed
> manually after installation.
>
> Novau is an attempt to write an open-source version of the NVidia
> binary driver. It aims to support all the fancy bits that the binary
> driver does, but without the non-free code. I didn't notice this driver
> becoming considered stable enough to go into Ubuntu, but apparently it
> has.
>
> > However when I open 'additional drivers' from System Settings I get 2
> > choices which seem identical:
> >
> >    - NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver [recommended]
> >    and
> >    - NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver [post-release updates]
> >
> > The descriptions with these drivers are identical...
>
> These are two incremental versions of the NVidia binary drivers. The
> 'Additional Drivers' tool will, in general, only show you those drivers
> since they're the ones considered 'additional'. The post-release
> updates one is just a slightly more updated version of the other one.
>
> --
> Avi
>
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