Arch Linux

jmatthewturner

Member

Registered: 2014-06-02

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Best drivers for an Nvidia 8600GTS?

Hi all. I installed Arch for the first time over the weekend. Everything went smoothly until it came time to start X - could never get it to work. I tried lots of different remedies (installing nvidia drivers from the repositories, installing the driver supplied by Nvidia themselves, blacklisting Nouveau, etc.). Nothing worked, and I think now the best thing is to start over clean and try to find where I went wrong (as there's a good chance I've done more harm than good in the process).

So as I nuke and reinstall, I'm wondering which driver will be best for my c. 2006 Nvidia 8600GTS card. Should I install the arch nvidia drivers with

pacman -Syu nvidia nvidia-utils nvidia-libgl libvdpau

or should I use the driver supplied by Nvidia? And if I go with the Nvidia-supplied driver, do I leave nvidia-utils, nvidia-libgl and/or libvdpau, or does it replace those, too?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

Last edited by jmatthewturner (2014-06-02 14:48:41)

scar

Member

From: Hungary

Registered: 2009-10-01

Posts: 442

Re: [SOLVED] Best drivers for an Nvidia 8600GTS?

First of all, please, read through the related Wiki pages.

The arch nvidia drivers (packages: nvidia, nvidia-utils, etc) are the ones supplied by nvidia, maintained and packaged by the arch maintainers and packagers.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA

The open source driver is called nouveau.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nouveau

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“The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
― William Gibson

jmatthewturner

Member

Registered: 2014-06-02

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Best drivers for an Nvidia 8600GTS?

Wow. I had a feeling someone would point out something incredibly obvious that I missed.

This page looks like it has everything I need on it. Don't know how I never landed on it yesterday.

Thanks!