Until recently I have been using ATI video cards in my systems. I now have a NVIDIA GeForce 210 card and I have been using the driver provided by NVIDIA. Because NVIDIA replace standard X libraries with their own versions I have on occasion had to uninstall their driver while making certain changes to the system, otherwise some X libraries cannot be found.

The latest -current updates, of August 29th and 30th, include X-related updates. What do people do when these updates are available - uninstall the proprietary driver, do the slackpkg update routine and then re-install the binary driver?

For me, just reinstalling the driver after an X or kernel update is all that has been necessary, with no need to uninstall.

1 members found this post helpful.

I usually rebuild the SBo package for my card series, revert the driver, and then reinstall the package. I don't use Nvidia's installer.

1 members found this post helpful.

One of the best things I ever did, in regards to running Linux, was to make the switch from ATi to NVidia. I started about four years ago with the 210 series, when none of the local stores had ATi based cards and I needed a video card immediately. In retrospect, I wish I had made the change years earlier. After about four years with the 210, I recently moved to the GT 730 series.


That should work, but it so easy to install the NVidia drivers I,

when there is a change of the kernel, xorg files and/or the multilib versions of glibc and gcc, and after the updates are complete, simply re-install the NVidia driver,

I can't imagine it getting any easier than that.

1 members found this post helpful.

OK that worked, more or less. Neglected to blacklist nouveau but that was easily solved.

The reason I asked was that the upgrade to kernel 4.1.6 meant I had to patch the NVIDIA installer last week, but I saved the driver and kernel packages (with thanks to Lenard and GazL for tips) so no need to patch it this time around.

All's well that ends well. Thanks.

Thanks for the tip cwizardone. My own system is due a massive upgrade soon so I will have a look into that GT 730, although I also use NetBSD and NVIDIA is not yet well supported over there, so I'm considering one of those Intel graphics processors in the CPU instead.

To deal with kernel updates, even easier is to enable the dkms option when initially installing the nvidia driver (there's a dkms SlackBuild at SBo). In the event of a kernel update (not often in a stable release but often enough in -current) you can arrange for dkms to update (build & install) the nvidia driver module whenever a new kernel is booted. Of course a new nvidia driver version needs manual installation. That procedure offers to remove the previous installation for you - no need to manually uninstall it.

The only times I've had problems is when a mesa update overwrites something that the nvidia driver installation has done. In such cases, installing the nvidia driver again has solved the problem. As before, no uninstallation of broken driver needed - the nvidia installer offers to do that for you.

chris

1 members found this post helpful.

Even better!

Thanks for the tip!

Interesting NetBSD would do that. OTOH, I know NVidia is well support by FreeBSD.
Actually, I was looking for the GT 740, but the GT 730 was all I could find locally. I'm going to have to get over my aversion to mail order.

NVidia has updated some of their legacy drivers and it works with Linux 4.1+

2 members found this post helpful.

Good to hereabout the updates to legacy driver source! Proprietary drivers built great on my stock slack64 14.1 system. But they tanked on config under the 4.1.6 kernel

...Think the config script wasn't aware of kernel 4 but the code was too deep for the amount of time I had available to fiddle with it. Now, i'm back on nouveau in that system.

@willysr: which kernel are you running and when did you last build?

I've had no problems building the NVidia drivers with the 4.1.6 kernel.

What version of the NVidia driver did you try?

Speaking for myself, version 340.76 didn't work with my GeForce 210 when current went to kernel 4.1.6. Version 340.93, which has just been released, works fine.