No nVidia legacy drivers below version 173.x
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#10 No nVidia legacy drivers below version 173.x
wont-fix
2021-03-14
2013-10-25
No
With the transition to Debian jessie we lost some of the binary nVidia drivers for legacy hardware. I don't know if they're going to be re-added, but if not then we should provide the packages ourselves to keep the support for older hardware. The driver versions in question are:
71xx and 96xx.
3.3.1 LXDE has the same problem but also includes nvidia 173
I've added nvidia many times over the years on various distros & I can't determine what is wrong this time.
If you do try to install nv 173 and it locks up or displays only the flashing cursor.
boot to rescue mode and find a terminal and
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
after wiping the xorg.conf the system will fall back to nouveau or framebuffer mode, then you can tweak nouveau settings
Maybe it's a question of the kernel version. If the drivers below 173 aren't provided upstream and we use the drivers from Stable, then it might be a question of kernel-driver compatibility. We should try to provide the packages ourselves, but I don't think anyone has any machine with a nVidia card that could use drivers below 173.
I might try compiling the necessary packages in a few days so that someone could test them, but I need to set up a 3.4-based Sparky environment (3.3.1 with updates will be compatible) first (I've got some SuperDrive problems right now that need to be resolved first).
Moving to 3.4. It's still an issue, but I'll be building some nVidia packages for the current kernel in a moment.
Sadly moving to DEV. Recent changes in the Debian Testing repository made the whole issue equal for all nVidia users (no binary drivers) due to the driver's incompatibility with xorg-server 1.16.
I think it is xorg causing the problems, Now with newer video card 7900GT I can get nv304 working with xorg 1.12 (via antiXMepis MX14) but not with xorg 1.15 (sparky, xubuntu etc..) hope this helps, I keep filing xorg bugs maybe one will be considered & fixed
It probably won't be fixed. Xorg is moving forward with it's API and ABI versions and supported nVidia drivers get support for the new API/ABI. That's probably why there's no older driver releases in Debian anymore, as nVidia is probably not supporting them with patches for newer Xorg API/ABI, thus they can't be built anymore. It's just a hypothesis though, as I haven't checked if that's the case (if I would, we would already have our own driver builds ;) ).
Won't fix. Older, unsupported drivers aren't updated for API/ABI changes. We won't be able to build working packages.