This is the most stable version of the NVIDIA Linux driver

Oct 2, 2014 13:58 GMT  ·  By

The Long Lived branch of the NVIDIA Linux driver has been updated and users can now download the 340.46 version, if it hasn’t already arrived in their repositories.

NVIDIA has several working branches for the Linux drivers and they each serve a different purpose. The current update is for the Long Lived branch, which is one of the least updated versions. This branch usually lands in various official repositories for Linux distros because it's considered to be very stable.

If you are an NVIDIA user, you also know that there is also the Short Lived branch, which sees lots of improvements and fixes. This doesn't usually get integrated in repos because it changes too often and the releases are not tested enough. From time to time, NVIDIA also pushes a Beta update, which is completely untested and rarely added to repos.

Finally, there is the Legacy GPU version, which actually encompasses a few iterations. It's designed for users with very old video cards. These driver updates don't get any new features, only compatibility improvements.

What's new in the NVIDIA 340.46 Linux driver

This is a very small release and it covers just a number of bugs that have been found and fixed. It might not be an important update, but make sure you install it as soon as it hits your repositories.

"An OpenGL issue that could cause glReadPixels() operations to be improperly clipped when resizing composited application windows, potentially leading to momentary X freezes has been fixed, a bug that could prevent the GLSL compiler from correctly evaluating some expressions when compiling shaders has been corrected, and a bug that could cause nvidia-installer to crash while attempting to run nvidia-xconfig on systems where that utility is missing has been repaired," reads the changelog.

Also, the NVIDIA developers have added a new option called UseSysmemPixmapAccel, which is able to better use the GPU acceleration for pixmaps allocated in system memory.

How to manually install NVIDIA drivers

If you really want to get the new drivers and you don't want to wait for the repos to get updated, the only other solution is to manually install them. We installed them in Ubuntu 14.04, so if you have this system (or any Ubuntu for that matter), read on. Open a full screen virtual terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + F1, log in with your user name and password, and enter these commands:

code
sudo service lightdm stop
sudo chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.46.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.46.run
Reboot the computer when you're done and voila, you now have the latest NVIDIA drivers. You can download NVIDIA Linux Display Driver 340.46 for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.