14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has announced that a new version of its Legacy driver for the Linux platform, 304.123, has been released and is ready for download.
NVIDIA still performs updates to the Legacy drivers and it tries to keep them afloat by making them compatible with newer versions of the Linux kernel and X Server.
The company maintains a few branches of the driver at the same time, but most of those versions are designed for newer graphics cards, and that means that users with older hardware will have to use something more age-appropriate. The problem with old drivers is that sometimes they don't work with fresh Linux kernel releases, and that can be cumbersome, to say the least.
This is the reason why, from time to time, NVIDIA is forced to make some small updates for the Legacy branch of their drivers, just to ensure that they are compatible with the latest releases.
According to the changelog, the compatibility with recent Linux kernels has been improved, a bug that could result in system instability while restoring the VGA console has been fixed, an interaction problem with xserver 1.15 that occasionally caused OpenGL applications to continue rendering when they were minimized or unmapped has been fixed, and support for the X.org xserver ABI 18 (xorg-server 1.16) has been added.
Also, the nvidia-bug-report.sh script has been updated to search the systemd journal for X server logs and messages from the NVIDIA kernel module, and a bug that caused corruption or blank screens on monitors that use EDID version 1.3 or older when they connected via DisplayPort, on graphics boards that use external DisplayPort encoders like Quadro FX 4800, has been corrected.
The last supported product by this driver is GeForce GTX 690, but the earliest ones should be GeForce 6100, GeForce 6600, and pretty much everything in between. If you have an older graphics card, this driver will not work and you won't be able to install it.
The NVIDIA developers provide a single binary file that should work on most Linux distributions out there, but installing it might require a little bit of expertise. You can also wait for this particular driver to arrive in the official repositories.
Check out the announcement for a complete list of fixes and improvements. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 304.123 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. Keep in mind that you will need to manually install the drivers on your system.