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What drivers for the GeForce 9650M GT?

Update: solution found! => here

On my laptop (Adus M50Vn), I’ve had a lot of trouble with Linux (both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.10) lately. After trying to update my NVIDIA graphics drivers on Windows XP, it turned out that the same problems starting to occur their too. So I was able to conclude that these issues were probably caused by the NVIDIA drivers and not by the OS itself. For Windows, I reverted back to the latest version I had installed without problem, version 180.70 (18 Nov 2008). For Linux, Ubuntu let me downgrade to 173 from the hardware drivers control panel (which at the moment seems to apply only to graphics drivers), and at first I didn’t understand why there wasn’t any other old version available (there were 2 choices only: 173 and 185). Then I did Fedora, but for this I had to go to NVIDIA’s website since Fedora doesn’t offer automatic installation for proprietary software. I eventually managed to find the legacy drivers page, which explained why Ubuntu let me only pick 173 as an old driver: it’s the latest legacy driver. Here is the Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris driver download page: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. Just pick the 173.14.20 and it should work fine. And actually, I just tried the 190.42 and it seems to work okay too on Fedora so you may want to try that one instead nvm it’s buggy too (NB: the 195.39 doesn’t work well on Windows XP: performances are much better but there are some important glitches).
Don’t forget that for Fedora (or any Linux installation which implies using NVIDIA’s official installer), with every kernel update you’ll need to re-run the NVIDIA driver installer… so keep it somewhere easy to find. Full installation procedure on Fedora 11:

  1. CTRL+ALT+F2 to go to a text console
  2. su to connect as root (of course you can also use sudo)
  3. init 3 to shutdown X
  4. run the installer (cd /directory then ./installer.sh). During the process it should be able to successfully update Xorg.conf.
  5. init 5 to restart X without restarting the whole computer

Posted in Asus M50Vn, graphic cards, Linux, nVidia, Windows.


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