Nvidia's Linux driver cripples Fujitsu Celsius H270 notebooks

Fujitsu Celsius H270 Notebook
Source: Fujitsu/Siemens Nvidia has released version 180.51 of their proprietary graphics driver for Linux. At the same time an entry by Andy Ritger of Nvidia in the Linux forums on nV News advised owners of Fujitsu Technology Solutions/Fujitsu-Siemens (FSC) Celsius H270 notebooks to switch to the new driver to eliminate an "interaction problem" between the driver and the Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) which clears the flash chip in the notebooks display. If cleared, the BIOS is unable on subsequent reboots to identify the display and is therefore unable to initialise it, leaving it blank even during POST (Power On Self Test).

The Bug Tracker of the RPM Fusion project has noted the problem with Nvidia's graphics driver for over a month. The bug tracker entry also contains further information on how a customer had experienced the problem and how the Fujitsu testing laboratory was able the reproduce the problem with Celsius H270 notebooks with a WUXGA display and a FX770M GPU.

Fujitsu subsequently contacted Nvidia, Nvidia supplied a test version of the 180.48 driver and Fujitsu has confirmed this works correctly on both Fedora and openSUSE 11.1. This fixed driver has now been released as version 180.51. Users who have experienced the problem are advised to contact Fujitsu technical support to have the EDID data restored.

The updated driver, as well as fixing the "interaction problem", includes enhancements such as support for the GeForce 9400 GT, 9600 GSO 512, GT130, GT 140 and GTS 250 graphics cards.

(djwm)