I ran the 20070415 CD through a few hoops today, and it looks good from my perspective. I wish I could take advantage of the automatic Nvidia driver installation, but the 9631 version Feisty tried to install just plain doesn’t work on my Geforce4 440 Go.

So rather than nitpick my way through the steps for patching and building the 8776 driver, I decided to just buffalo my way through it. I pulled out the nvidia-glx driver Feisty had installed, patched the driver and started up the installer.

Actually, it worked fine. I’ll have to append my howto, because I didn’t even have build-essential installed. The installer complained a little bit when it couldn’t find pkg-config, but that’s all it did. After I told it to proceed, it build the module, inserted it and configured my xorg.conf without blinking. I adjusted the settings and restarted GDM, and it went straight to a login. glxgears kicked out something like 2770 fps immediately thereafter.

I count myself as one of the lucky ones, really. It could be a lot worse. If my biggest problem with Feisty at this point in time is an occasional driver rebuild whenever the kernel is updated, I’m doing pretty well.

Edit: I spoke too soon. On reboot I got the BSOD because the restricted drivers were still showing the 7184 kernel module, and the driver was the 8776. I ended up doing it right. 🙄