The nvidia 304.37 driver is out

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#1

Check this out we won’t need to blacklist nouveau any more!
NVIDIA Long Lived 304.37 released | Unixmen

And of course get it here:
Drivers | GeForce

#2

I did not know nouveau was blacklisted.

It seems to be the only driver that works on my system, but I may give the new nvidia driver a test run.

#3

I’ve just discovered nouveau now works fully. I couldn’t get it to work with kaffeine before.
I’m sticking with nouveau for now but I’ve just updated nvidia driver in my factory partition.

#4

Any idea as to when this will be available via repository ??

Thanks

#5

Best answer sometime on or after the final release of 12.2 which maybe after Sep 5, 2012.

#6

Hey, there is display rotation in Nvidia X Server Settings. That wasn’t there before.

#7

It pays to be persistent… or stubborn. I have an older card: 7600GS. The nvidia drivers stopped working for me at 280.xx. I kept a copy of that driver to re-install each time I tried a newer driver and it failed. I’m happy to say the 304.37 driver works just fine! Except, I can’t seem to find any difference from the old driver?!?

#8

If I install the nVidia driver from repository (for opensuse 12.1) for my GeForce 8600GT, will it have display rotation now? I’ve been avoiding using those drivers for a few months because they didn’t have rotation last time. When I tried to uninstall them (to use the default driver with display rotation) I messed up my system and ended up having to reinstall opensuse from scratch. (I’m not that knowledgeable with linux yet–just a few months into it.)

Also, I don’t know how to upgrade from 12.1 to 12.2 and I’m afraid it will break something anyway.

Thanks for any help.

#9

Since your new I have 2 very strong suggestions for you my 1st recommendation:
Please stay with 12.1 for at least another month! Until at least Oct 5 Please!
Then my 2nd recommendation learn a liitle bit more about how Opensuse works by doing the steps below:

1)First get some extra things that you need to get the nvdia drivers installed, open Yast
2) Type “gcc” in the Search in the left pane in the right pane find & check gcc
Type “make” in the Search in the left pane in the right pane find & check make
Type “kernel” in the Search in the left pane in the right pane
check kernel-source, kernel-devel & kernel syms. Other things will auto check to install you’ll want them too. Click Accept. When Yast is done close Yast.(Important tip here: Check Yast Online Update regularly When there’s a kernel update check to make sure that the 3 kernels have the same number. This’ll save you a lot of trouble when the kernel updates come out later.)
3) Go to the nvidia driver site & download the drivers to your Downloads folder:
Drivers | GeForce
4)Check this out:
http://forums.opensuse.org/content/121-lnvhw-load-nvidia-driver-hard-way-runlevel-3-version-1-46.html
The instructions there are pretty easy for a newcomer to understand, & will help you to learn a little more about how Opensuse works. Then after you have a better idea of how it all works then try out 12.2 OK?:slight_smile:

#10

304.43 is out

#11

Thanks! Downloading now.

#12

This thread was started on August 16th. On August 29th - maybe even a couple days before, but I noticed only yesterday - 304.37 was available in nvidia repo for openSUSE.

$ rpm -qa --last | grep nvidia          
x11-video-nvidiaG02-**304.37**-19.1               **Wed 29 Aug 2012** 02:42:14 PM PDT
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop-304.37_k3.1.0_1.2-18.1 Wed 29 Aug 2012 02:41:06 PM PDT
nvidia-computeG02-304.37-19.1                 Wed 29 Aug 2012 02:40:37 PM PDT

This was posted 2 days ago (August 28 th):

And today (August 30 th) the nvidia driver was just updated in repo:

$ rpm -qa --last | grep nvidia
x11-video-nvidiaG02-**304.43**-20.1               **Thu 30 Aug 2012** 12:58:58 AM PDT
nvidia-computeG02-304.43-20.1                 Thu 30 Aug 2012 12:58:52 AM PDT
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop-304.43_k3.1.0_1.2-19.1 Thu 30 Aug 2012 12:58:43 AM PDT

It means that the packager has been working hard lately. Thus downlading and installing the nvidia driver manually has absolutely no advantage in 99% of the cases.

It hasn’t always been that way. The maintainer already released buggy versions in the past (and deserved and got criticism) and might eventually still do in the future. But we have to admit that the nvidia repo is pretty up to date at the moment.

I know why I never had to install the nvidia driver for many years (can’t even tell how many) in what is stupidly called ‘the hard way’.

  • The first reason is that it was never needed. The majority of users can install the nvidia driver from repo once,disable the repo afterwards to avoid buggy updates and leave with this driver until the next OS release (between 9 and 12 months).
  • The second reason is that if ever it was needed or desired by gamers or kernel/driver hobbyists, most users could afford to wait between 2 weeks and 2 days to get a clean driver package and spare themselves the stress of building the kernel module - it’s not extremly complicated, but it fails (and it will under circumstances if you don’t know what you are doing), you’ll have more questions to ask and more work to do before beeing able to start X again.