Linux light 6.0 video detection.

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

Ok, well I appreciate what you are saying however, its um wrong in this case.

I previously had Linux Lite 5.8 on the system.
LL 5.8 gave me the option to install the proprietary nvidia drivers.  Version 340.108 is [last version to support the card] [ https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/156163/en-us/ ]

I used those drivers and was able to run hardware h.264 decode from several streaming apps and use VLC to test  with.

I think you may be thinking about the requirements for hardware ENCODE.. [something I would not dream of trying on this old box]

I was also able to run steam games  [direct x using proton] at a almost decent frame rate. [25-40 fps]
I was able to use the steam streaming function which used the H.264 decode.
Moonlight [similar app that streams from the nvidia card on the server side] also worked fairly well.

I may have to see if I can find a manual way to install the driver, I tried "sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall" but that did not work..
Unfortunately without access to the proprietary driver like LL 5.8 had much of this does not work.

I salute the nouveau project and they have done some amazing things but its still a bit behind the proprietary driver.
[https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/VideoAcceleration.html]

[Şerban S.]

[...]I wanted to test against the proprietary driver...

The driver, has nothing to do with the hardware coding and decoding on this very old machine with a very old video card, with 256 MB of DDR 2. This capabilities, are available only for high-end video cards, with at least 2 GB of DDR. In fact, you need at least 4 GB (4096 MB!) of GDDR in order to be able to process hardware coding and decoding. The cheapest solution is NVidia Quadro K2000 with 4 GB GDDR. So, even if you install "the latest & the greatest", driver it will do nothing; simply because you need another laptop with another video card to do such things. I have a GeGorce GT107 (GeForce GT630 OEM) with 2 GB DDR 3 and does nothing as such. The GPU, lacks the capabilities to use the NV_ENC driver.
So, the driver is OK. The hardware is the problem.

Think of this: you are running an 2022 OS, on a 2007 machine, and IT DOES WORK!
Try to install Windows 11 on the same machine. See what you get...

Anyway, Linux Lite 6.x, does wonders on very old machines. See the video below:

Best thoughts!

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

Sorry, I wasn't paying close enough attention.
Its the Dell Inspiron 1720.

https://www1.la.dell.com/kn/en/corp/Laptops/inspnnb_1720/pd.aspx?refid=inspnnb_1720&s=corp

It has the NVIDIA®  GeForceTM  Go 8600M GT with 256MB DDR2 Card in it.  [it also has 6 gig mem and a 256 gig ssd as well as an Intel T9500 cpu]

Now LL6.0 does install and it does come up using a nouveau driver but it does not seem to support h.264 hardware decode. so I wanted to test against the proprietary driver..

[Şerban S.]

So, I have an old dell 1700 laptop with a nvidia 8600 video card.
I was running 5.8 and the "install proprietary drivers function" worked and detected the card giving me the option to install the drivers.
 
I decided to try the new version but for some reason I am unable to install the proprietary drivers. It no longer detects them as available.

Any Ideas?

Hi!
Can you be more specific? What exactly do you have?
Is it this: Dell Vostro 1700 Core™2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz, 2GB?

One possible reason for this, is that the new kernel, 5.15.x  (LL 5.8 has 5.4.x kernel) might have included the driver for this video adapter. In this case, it should work without installing any other driver.
Did you have problems with the video after installing LL 6.0?

Best regards!

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

So, I have an old dell 1700 laptop with a nvidia 8600 video card.
I was running 5.8 and the "install proprietary drivers function" worked and detected the card giving me the option to install the drivers.
 
I decided to try the new version but for some reason I am unable to install the proprietary drivers. It no longer detects them as available.

Any Ideas?