Re: [SLE] NVIDA 6200 was FX5200

On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 11:35 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:
Dave Howorth wrote:
On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 15:26 +0200, Matthias Hopf wrote:
Wouldn't recommend. Get a 6200, in the future you'll need fragment
programs, even for 2D (video acceleration).

I've been reading this exchange with interest, because I wanted to
replace my onboard graphics. So I bought a 6200 (XFX GEFORCE 6200 AGP 8X
256MB DDR2 - a.k.a. GF 6200 256MB DDR2 TV DVI VerF.4).

Yesterday, I plugged it in. My motherboard (MSI K8M Neo-V) evidently
noticed, because there was no video on the motherboard connector and
there was video on the graphics card VGA connector. It all worked. There
don't seem to be any BIOS settings I need to or can change. So I
switched off, smiled and went to bed.

Today, I thought I'd upgrade the video driver, which is exceptionally
easy with SUSE, yes? I switched on, it noticed new hardware, asked me to
confirm the nv driver, I said OK, everything still fine. So then I go
into YOU and ask for the nvidia driver. It downloads and everything is
fine up until it tries to use it!

Then the screen goes dark. Not black but a dark marbled pattern through
which text is just about visible. The screen is also obviously low-res.
So I switch to a terminal (CTRL-ALT-1) and the screen is darker:
unusable.

I reboot and select 'failsafe'. Hah! It says:

...
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
PCI: Via IRQ fixup

and hangs! So much for failsafe.

I reboot and let it default to normal. The boot sequence looks just like
it always does until it starts X. Then it goes dark swirling patterns
again. This time I can see the prompt in CTRL-ALT-1. I copy the original
(non-nvidia, non-nv) xorg.conf back - lucky I saved it?! I reboot again.

And here I am. The colours and brightness are normal. It's running in my
normal 1280x1024 BUT what's visible on screen is not the whole desktop.
What's visible appears to be 1150x1000.

Has anybody seen this or have any idea what's wrong? It doesn't seem to
be a hardware problem because the boot sequence works.

I just noticed something else. Before installing the driver I went to
<http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html> as instructed
by Nvidia. On the SUSE page, I clicked on the SUSE LINUX 9.3-AMD64 link.
It says:

"It is recommended to use YOU (YaST Online Update) for (re)installation
of the nvidia driver. There are several reasons for this. First, it's
simple. Second, and this is the most important one, you won't need to
recompile the nvidia kernel module after a kernel update.

Inside YOU enable "Installable and Installed Patches" for "Show Patch
Category" and select "Download NVIDIA(r) Graphics Driver" from the
patches list (usually at the bottom of the list). Note, that you need
to mark it as "Update" (right mouse click) if you already installed it
before and the driver was uninstalled - for any reason. Proceed as
usual now. After YOU has finished restart your Xserver (i.e. logout
from your Xsession) and you're fine."

I followed those instructions, but I've just noticed that at the top of
the page there is a contradictory note, which says:

"NOTE: The nvidia installer does not work as long as a Xserver is still
running and the nvidia kernel module is still loaded. Therefore
please boot into runlevel 3 by specifying "3" as kernel boot
option or switch to runlevel 3 ("init 3") and unload the kernel
module ("rmmod nvidia") before running the nvidia installer."

So which is right? Should I be running YOU inside an Xsession as the
specific instructions say, or should I be at runlevel 3 as the general
note says? And if the latter, what is the recovery procedure to correct
the results of having followed the instructions?

Thanks, Dave


I always do the run level 3 installation. Haven't had a failure on that
for several years. After that, run sax2.

Art


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