Nvidia FreeBSD Display Driver is a proprietary OpenGL video driver that tries to support the graphics cards produced by Nvidia on FreeBSD operating systems. The driver is distributed in different branches, as Short Lived (short term supported) or Long Lived (long term supported), offering support for both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.
Installing Nvidia Solaris Display Driver
In order to install the Nvidia FreeBSD Display Driver, the user must download from the Downloads section above the package that corresponds to its hardware architecture, enter a console session and execute the “tar xzf NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-xxx.xx.tar.gz && cd NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-xxx.xx & make install” on 64-bit systems or the “tar xzf NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-xxx.xx.tar.gz && cd NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-xxx.xx & make install” command for 32-bit systems, as root, where xxx.xx is the version number of the driver.
Before you run the above commands, keep in mind that you must first install the kernel header for your FreeBSD box. During the installation, users will be asked if they want to let the installer automatically configure the newly installed driver and optimize it for their graphics cards. Alternatively, expert users can manually edit the X configuration file, or, after installation, they can execute the “nvidia-xconfig’ command via a Linux terminal emulator to set the Nvidia driver as default for their system.
Is my FreeBSD box supported?
Yes, most probably! We’ve successfully tested both the Short Lived and Long Lived braches of this driver with the current stable releases of the FreeBSD operating system, here at the Softpedia Labs. Both 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (x86) hardware platforms are supported at this time.
What about old Nvidia graphics card!
Because we’ve received many complaints from our FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris users running very old Nvidia graphics cards, we feel obliged to mention here that this driver will not work with their video cards. Therefore, you should search Softpedia for the latest Nvidia FreeBSD Legacy Display Drivers.
