Ubuntu
nvidia-graphics-drivers-96 package

  1. Bug #626974
  2. Comment #39

Comment 39 for bug 626974

Revision history for this message
Firass Shehadeh (firass-shehadeh) wrote : Re: ABI change in xorg 1.9 breaks legacy nvidia-96 and nvidia-173 drivers in Maverick

I ran into this issue while upgrading from 10.4 to 10.10 on my 6 years old Dell Inspiron 8600.

According to lspci, my card is:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV28 [GeForce4 Ti 4200 Go AGP 8x] (rev a1)

If I try to use the nvidia driver in my Xorg configuration file, then X windows fails to start. If I comment out the driver line, then I think I was getting a generic driver, but the resolution was awkward, and I didn't the proper aspect ratio (the screen was compressed) and I couldn't get nice resolution).

So I removed the proprietary driver, and now X Windows is able to start, and the resolution is as usual. I think this is due to the "NOUVEAU" driver that comes by default (I saw that in /var/logs/Xorg.0.log).

The main drawback: all the animated icons and windows decorations look very awful. It is like the bitmaps are off or something like it. I still prefer this option over the bad aspect/resolution, or downgrading Xorg.

Hopefully the Nvidia 96 driver will be updated to fix the issue with Xorg, or the nouveau driver will be updated to remove the annoying bitmap effects (I don't know how else to describe this).

To be fair, the issue touches several software components, and it is not easy to convince all of them to march towards the same release schedule.