Suse/Nvidia Saga

From: Paul A. Bennett (paul_a_bennett_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 02/12/05 

Date: 11 Feb 2005 19:21:01 -0800

Hello!

I would appreciate it if someone could help me out with a problem I'm
having with my SuSE Professional 9.1 machine. It's an AMD64 machine
with a Forsa (nVidia) GE Force 4 MX440 graphics card.

This machine has been running quite happily for over a year.

The other night, when I went to log in, I was faced with a black
screen. On rebooting, I noticed that, when the refresh rate changed
in preparation to bringing up X, the screen went black and a small,
flashing blue hashmark of a cursor showed up for a few seconds in the
upper left hand corner and then disappeared.

Thinking that the graphics card had given up the ghost, and knowing
that my machine was on warranty, I brought it to the computer store
from which I had bought it to have them check it out. They used a
shop drive running Windows to test the machine at high resolutions.
All seemed fine to them.

On reading news groups, I discovered that it is possible that there
might have been an automatic YaST update which installed a new kernel.
 Indeed, the macine is now running a new kernel 2.6.5-7.145-default,
dated 27 JAN 2005. According to the note I read, all I had to do was
to reinstall the nVidia drivers.

I'm beginning to think of nVidia as invidious, as I recall the grief I
originally had in installing the nVidia driver...but that's a
different story.

I scrupulously followed the instructions, changing the run level to 3,
then executing the nVidia driver installer. On rebooting to run level
5, however, I was amazed to see that everything is TFUed. The white
nVidia splash screen remains on the screen after the graphical login
process begins but it's as if all the borders and other features of X
have been absorbed by the splash screen because the only distinguising
colours are a few from the icons. None of the windows or black lines
or anything like that is visible.

Everything is misplaced, right-mouse pop-up menus don't appear. New
windows appear shrunken in weird places.

In short, there are graphical elements there but everything is totally
unusable.

I went back to run level 3 and tried to use YaST2 to reconfigure the
graphics. Alas, no joy.

I would really appreciate any help that someone might be able to offer
me to get my machine back in order.

Were I angrier, I might ask why SuSE and nVidia didn't test the
installation process to ensure that this kind of retrograde would not
occur.

Thanks for reading and for any suggestions you might have.

Paul

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: [opensuse] 11.0 DVD fresh install: boot to command line
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