Re: nvidia & 2009.2

dlwiggers wrote:
> Well, I never would have believed it.  I admit I've read about it, but
> there's nothing like personal experience.
>
> I attempted to install 2009.1 and 2009Spring in a new box over the 
> weekend.
>
> 2009.1 x won't run.  I get a flashing dash on the top left and nothing
> else.  Boots in runlevel 2, though.
>
> 2009Spring, ditto
>
> 2009 84, ditto
>
> 2009 dual, ditto
>
> What's interesting is:
>
> Knoppix boots with great splashes of beauty, as does Redhat, Ubuntu, and
> Kubuntu,  all of which I downloaded out of frustration and none of which
> I am seriously thinking of keeping on an active box.
>
> The box is a dual processor 64 bit 3500amd, with 4g memory and a 1.5tb
> sata drive.  The display is an antique flat screen, but I haven't gotten
> there yet,anyway.
>
> Does anyone know what to change to stop the frilly graphic startup?  I
> just want to watch the okay's scroll up to login, the way I always did,
> then play with mcc, I suppose, or use it to serve Apache until mdv gets
> the graphic act together.
>
> On the bright side, the iso's that didn't work are easily found on the
> net now. :)
>
> Of course, a real solution would be nice.
>
> TIA
>
>
Yes, there are certainly issues with nvidia cards and probably AMD as 
well.  Maryse had trouble, and I lost X going from 2008.1 to 2009.1.  
The new version of xorg probably has something to do with it.  Nvidia 
continues to provide updated drivers but as far as one can tell these 
are compiled against an older version of xorg.  There is supposed to be 
a backport for xorg at PLF but I did not get very far with that, not 
knowing what packages to look for.

You are saying that other distributions boot into X?  That looks 
interesting; it would be handy to know what their xorg.conf files look 
like, especially the device and screen sections.  On the other hand 
there have been cries for help on the Ubuntu forums over this same 
issue.  For nvidia I accepted the 69xx driver Mandriva provides and 
added an option in xorg.conf to suppress the "extended GPU capabilities 
check" after removing a big chunk of the Screen section.  That enabled X 
to use the native resolution for the monitor but slows something down, 
not sure what.  GoogleEarth still runs fairly smoothly when panning, but 
glxgears returns framerates about 30 times lower than before.

This month's Linux Format comes up with another suggestion; delete 
xorg.conf (i.e. mv it to a backup) and let the X server try to rebuild 
it at boot time.  This apparently forces it to read the EDID information 
from the monitor and generate a configuration file for whatever 
resolutions it supports.  I have not tried that; maybe you could be the 
guinea pig.

If you use kdm, an option can be passed to it at boot time to provide 
extended diagnostic information in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file.  I 
think this is done via a parameter in KDE space.  Will look that up if 
you want to tinker.

Len




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