Finally, my old hardware wont suck to use!
Last week I got a PC from my friend. I decided to make that something I play PC games on and use my other PC for home development. So I moved the Nvidia 7600 from my Linux desktop to the new PC and my old Nvidia 5400LE back to my desktop Linux development machine. This usually goes fine as the proprietary Nvidia drivers are first rate and the installer is easy enough to use. Well, turns out, its not as easy as it once was.
Nvidia seemed to deprecate my old 5400LE video card in the up-to-date proprietary driver sometime in the last year so I have to use the old legacy Nvidia drivers to get it to work with the proprietary driver. OK well that should be fine right? No it wasn’t. The old legacy driver didn’t auto configure xorg like the old one did. So basically, I installed the old video card ran the legacy driver setup and was in 800×600 land. Yippie. So it was a fun hunt to track down how to set the display resolution. Long story short the legacy driver doesn’t seem to really work well and I don’t have 3D on the card. I have the amazing 2D from the in kernel Nvidia driver but the rendering artifacts are annoying and font smoothing doesn’t work.
My choices at this point involve more pain of screwing with configs, hacking kernels and doing stuff I don’t want to do or reinstalling everything and having the setup process of Ubuntu work it out. I bet that would fix it all and I have backups, that might be less pain than the “magic config file hunt and change scenario.”
However, the long term fix in my opinion for Linux is to STOP using hardware that requires so much manual work. Which means, stop using hardware that doesn’t have relatively useful drivers in the mainline kernel. Which is why the recent inclusion of the Nouveau drivers that can do useful 3D is so sweet. Since I am not gaming on Linux anymore due to the pain involved in that(sorry, spent the last 5-8 years in Wine and thats not really fun) I don’t need super bling cutting edge 3D in Linux. Which is why the recent work in the free software Nvidia space is so cool. Its the long term fix for a problem that I hate dealing with in Linux.