The quantal version of nvidia-settings doesn't support legacy nvidia driver (173) and tends to be backported to Precise 12.04.3

[Danilo de Andrade Mendes]

When I tried to configure my display using the nvidia-settings package from Quantal repository, I meet the error message: "The NVIDIA X driver on (...) is not new enough to support the nvidia-settings Display Configuration page.". It makes sense, because I'm using the legacy nvidia-173 driver. My non-elegant soluction was install the nvidia-settings from Precise repository, that solved the problem.
Being more precise:
$ dpkg -l |grep nvidia
ii nvidia-173 173.14.36-0ubuntu0.1 i386
ii nvidia-settings 304.51-0ubuntu2 i386
  DIDN'T WORKS

but
$ dpkg -l |grep nvidia
ii nvidia-173 173.14.36-0ubuntu0.1 i386
ii nvidia-settings 295.33-0ubuntu1 i386
 WORKS

There is no package that the name is something like nvidia-settings-173 available in Quantal repository, but it's required to configure properly a old Nvidia device.

[Flames_in_Paradise (ellisistfroh-deactivatedaccount)]

I've linked yr bugreport to original driver-updata request. You may recognize it was asked for nvidia-settings there in accordance with the driver.

These things should work automatically nowadays.

Nvidia even supplies a separate settings version to go with each driver (since 2007):

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/nvidia-settings/

This shouldn't be to hard to find for a dev...

Even though most devs do this as a hobby in their leisure time, means there is no payment --- the word "disapointment" is the friendliest describtion of my feelings towards this frustrating situation.

Thanks for reporting this bug!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

I think it's clearer that the settings package bug is separate from the driver update one, so de-duplicated this.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I have removed the tag regression-update from this bug report as the tag should be used for a regression which happened when installing a package from the -updates repository. This tag is used by the Stable Release Updates team to watch for regressions in packages from -updates and inappropriate usage of this tag makes it harder to find this category of regression. Thanks for your understanding. To learn more about how we use tags you may want to review http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Tags.

[Till Harbaum (till-harbaum)]

> My non-elegant soluction was install the nvidia-settings from Precise repository, that solved the problem.
This works as far as the settings dialog doesn't complain about the version, anymore. But at least for me the driver and the settings program don't cooperate correctly and e.g. the twinview doesn't support/enable the xinerama extensions.

[Flames_in_Paradise (ellisistfroh-deactivatedaccount)]

It might be worth to take a little peekaboo over the shoulder of our big sister Debian:

http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-settings-legacy-173xx.html

http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-173xx.html

Would be nice to have this fixed before 12.04.4

[Flames_in_Paradise (ellisistfroh-deactivatedaccount)]

anyone?