I am one of those people who finds that there isn’t any real need to crawl out of the 1Ghz basement and bring my hardware up to date. The problem with that philosophy, of course, is the fact that I’ve pinned myself to a certain technology, and it has at last come back to bite me on the

Nvidia’s 97xx drivers drop support for some GeForce4-era hardware — and when I say drop, I mean drop. As in, no video output whatsoever. Screen is turned off, powerless, LCD deactivated, game over, end of line.

I had this problem first with the 97xx drivers in Arch and I was certain I had done something wrong. I realized my error when I reinstalled nvidia-glx on Feisty and got the same powerless LCD as a result. That’s when I found the note that left GeForce4-era users out in the cold.

From 97xx on, nVidia display drivers no longer support some graphics cards, such as the Geforce 4 MX. If your driver installation fails (the log file will read: “version 97xx will ignore this gpu”), use Option 2, go to “Archive” and download the latest 96xx driver.

Arch Linux seems ahead of the game on this issue, having already made up a nvidia-96xx and related packages, while the 97xx-series holds the foreground.

Feisty, on the other hand, seems to stand at the 96xx driver, and I don’t expect the 97xx-series will make it in before the April release. I have serious, serious doubts about there ever being a “nvidia-mid-legacy” package that sticks to the 96xx series.

The problem is that even the 96xx-series drivers (in both Arch and Ubuntu) give me the same powerless LCD, with no video output whatsoever. So I have the choice of using the 71xx-series drivers in the nvidia-glx-legacy package, or building from the 87xx-series from Nvidia’s site. Or use the nv driver. No option is particularly attractive.

The awful touch of irony is that a year ago, when I was quite new to Linux on the whole, I managed to build the 8756 driver from scratch, and I was quite proud of myself. Now it seems I’m back where I started.