NVIDIA Changed the Name of Their Driver

If you have been happily using the two NVIDIA display driver packages with yast2:

• x11-video-nvidia
• nvidia-gfx-kmp-default

If this is you, and you recently upgraded, you may find your nvidia display doesn’t work anymore, and fails every time to load a graphical display, kicking you back into text mode. This is really frustrating, because if you’ve been using yast2 to handle your nvidia display drivers, you know that for a long time you could upgrade the kernel without recompiling your display driver. To any linux user of nvidia products, this is a simply blindingly amazing feat of technology. Let’s just forget for a second that users of other operating systems do this everyday in a completely unremarkable way.

Well, NVIDIA thought, just for kicks, they would rename the yast packages you need to use. For no apparent reason, they are now called

• x11-video-nvidiaG01
• nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default

So to get your NVIDIA display back, go into yast, uninstall x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-default, and install x11-video-nvidiaG01 and nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default. Then it will work again. Unless you have one of the legacy cards described in http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html.

Why did they change the name? Who knows. Why did they make the new default packages the new weird name? Who knows. What does G01 mean? Who knows.