On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.<b...@iguanasuicide.net> wrote: > On Wednesday 26 August 2009 16:52:06 Jeff H. wrote: >> Been thinking of switching to Debian. Does it support Nvidia laptop cards? > > The "nv" X11 driver is in the Offical Free-Software-Only Debian package > repository. I think the "nouveau" X11 driver is also being packaged by a DD > but is not in, or scheduled to be in any release of Debian. > > The "nvidia" X11 driver and the kernel module of the same name are part of the > non-free repository. These packages are second-class citizens; their closed- > source nature makes it impossible to resolve non-packaging issues within > Debian. > > Packages in Official Stable Debian do not get upgraded to new version from > upstream, so it will not include the latest release from NVidia. In addition, > the kernel module is not always kept in sync with the latest kernel, so you > may need to compile that yourself. There are helper scripts and source > packages available.
While this used to be the case, I think it is no longer so (although I'm on testing, not stable). There is now a package for the nividia kernel and module which keeps everything in sync; I have not had to recompile the kernel to catch up with the nvidia module in a very long time. And it works very nicely. Patrick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
