[sclug] Ubuntu 8.10 upgrade

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2008, Neil Haughton wrote:

> I just spotted this in the Ubuntu 8.10 release notes:
> *
> The 71 and 96 series of proprietary nVidia drivers, as provided by the
> nvidia-glx-legacy and nvidia-glx packages in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, are not
> compatible with the X.Org included in Ubuntu 8.10. Users with the nVidia
> TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are
> affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead.
> This driver does not support 3D acceleration*.
>
> So unless you have a bang up to date Nvidia card, upgrading to 8.10 will
> apparently break 3D acceleration. How annoying is that?

1) This is one of the perils of buying hardware that is only supported (or
only /fully/ supported) by non-Free drivers.

2) The Nouveau driver has some support for 3D and XVideo/Motion Compensation
acceleration, which should be an improvement on the 2D-only nv driver.

3) This might be a short-term thing until nVidia release new legacy drivers
which work with the version of X.Org that Ubuntu have included in 8.10 (and
presumably other distros will start including RSN).

> Neil

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

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