With NVIDIA having released a stable 195.xx Linux driver and are working on a second stable update that's due out in the coming days, the bulk of the driver development work is now focused on their next major driver series. This next major driver release from NVIDIA is the 256.xx series, but what are you hoping it will bring forth?

NVIDIA hasn't released as many Linux driver updates in May as they have in past months, but this week they are out with the NVIDIA 185.18.14 driver update.

While NVIDIA's driver engineers are hard at work on the 190.xx driver series, which among other features does bring OpenGL 3.2 support, for those living by the stable releases there is a new driver that's out today. The NVIDIA 185.18.29 Linux driver was uploaded to NVIDIA's FTP server this morning and does bring a number of changes as listed in their official release highlights.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS includes improved integration for nVidia binary driver packages. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of compatibility with the installer provided upstream on the nVidia website.

It was just one week ago that NVIDIA released a stable Linux driver update, but today for those wishing to live on the bleeding edge of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver development, the first beta release in the 260.xx series is now available for testing. The NVIDIA 260.19.04 Linux driver brings a lot to the table.

Leveraging existing distribution channels to streamline supply, is an age old business methodology. But can a downstream software distribution channel be used for upstream hardware collection? I don't see why not.

It was just two weeks ago that the NVIDIA 180.29 driver was released for Linux and we talked about how NVIDIA had kept pushing out many updates in a short period of time. Well, they didn't stop with the 180.29 release. Available since last night is now the NVIDIA 180.35.

While NVIDIA has been working on the 195.xx Linux driver since before last November, they have yet to officially release a stable driver in this series as of yet. Betas have been available and they even had to recall their recent drivers over a fan speed issue.

Thanks to the surprise push this morning of the Nouveau driver for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, this free software, reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver stack is on its way to being used in a lot more Linux systems and distributions. The xf86-video-nv driver just doesn't have any future compared to the Nouveau driver.