New Nvidia Drivers Needed for X.Org 7.3

Ubuntu 7.10, which will be released next month, includes X.org 7.3. This new X.org includes an ABI update that requires drivers to be recompiled. This causes a problem with closed-source drivers such as Nvidia’s graphics driver because there will need to be a new version.

I am sure this has been planned this out long before, but what does this mean for Gutsy? What if the new Nvidia driver is not ready in time to be included in the Ubuntu repositories?

Just a heads up: whee let us know that the latest release of X.Org, version 7.3, had an X server ABI revision which requires video drivers to be rebuilt. This isn’t possible with binary drivers like NVIDIA’s, but you can force it to run by starting X with the -ignoreABI argument (e.g. ““startx – -ignoreABI”). This has worked for some users, but whee reported a lockup issue with his system.

[update]

Fabien Chaillou says:

The main part of Xorg in the X server and in that case this is the server that has a new ABI for video drivers and as this is version 1.4 that will not be included in gutsy there will be no problem.

The main problem here i think is that people think that Xorg 7.3 will be included in gutsy whereas it technically won’t really be (because the major part of the release that is the x server 1.4 won’t be in).

This means that the current Nvidia driver will work just fine with Ubuntu 7.10.

[update]

If you really want to use the full X.Org 7.3, there are problems with it and the Nvidia driver. See here for more info.

Archived Comments