Bug: Ubuntu 8.10 and older nvidia video cards October 31, 2008
Posted by claudio in Uncategorized.Tags: bug, nvidia, ubuntu bug, workaround
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EDIT: Workaround not longer needed as the drives has been fixed on the Ubuntu repositories.
Yeah. New Ubuntu release. Traditionally, this means upgrading without reading the release notes.
<Curse>. This is what it says (I read today):
nVidia “legacy” video support
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.
Users of other nVidia chipsets that are supported by the 173 or 177 driver series will be transitioned to the nvidia-glx-173 or nvidia-glx-177 package instead. However, unlike drivers 96 and 71, drivers 173 and 177 are only compatible with CPUs that support SSE (e.g. Intel Pentium III, AMD Athlon XP or higher). Systems with older CPUs will also be transitioned to the nv driver on upgrade.
The “nv” driver does not support my dual-monitor 2 x 1680×1050 resolution. After looking for some workarounds (compiling kernels) and at the point of a downgrade to 8.04, I found an easy solution.
In short the nvidia driver included in Ubuntu is:
1. Not compatible with the new kernel.
2. Not compatible with the new Xorg.
Long fix: replace these components.
Easy fix: get the new beta driver released yesterday by Nvidia. It solved all my problems 
. Go to their forum and you will find the new drivers on top of the page (sticky posts). Just follow their instructions to install it (you will need to install linux-headers-generic).(Then wait until Ubuntu and Nvidia fix the problem.)
THANK YOU! Will go check out it now..
This worked for me, too, but not on the first go. For whatever reason, a regular dist-upgrade did not install a 2.6.27 kernel, plus I had headers and sources (and a tangle of symlinks) from earlier kernels that had to be purged. The Nvidia installer would not succeed until I cleaned those up.
LQ
I didn’t succeed founding driver for my FX 5500, Still searching around for appropriate…
To the author – which new driver (released yesterday) you mean, because i did not found them ??