Talk:NVIDIA

From openSUSE

OpenSuse 11 NVidia 9800 GT not working with one-click

Tried enabling my nvidia 9800 gt with one-click fails. Installation goes without any troubles but card not detected and also not detected after forcing it with "sax2 -r". Still got the VESA framebuffer.

Screen resolution not supported in 11.0

After downloading and installing (one-click or the hard way) either version (Suse or Nvidia) of the driver for my 7300LE card, the resolution of the 19" IIYama monitor (preferred res 1440x900@60HZ) was still not supported with OpenSuse 11.0. At long last, the solution was to put a specific modeline for 1440x900 into /etc/X11/xorg.conf, together with putting the "1440x900" mode at the right places. The modeline was constucted by gtf.

It took me a lot of time to find the solution, being just a more or less experienced Suse-user. There were no instructions, hints or howto about this the restricted character of the Nvidia divers and or X-org. I succeeded bij looking into an installed Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) system's xorg.conf, together with some Ubuntu forum discussion. Should there not be an entry in SDB or so with warnings and directions?

Are the steps for 10.2 really accurate?

Are the steps for 10.2 really accurate? I followed them exactly, and X wouldn't start after that. I had to edit xorg.conf, go to the Device section and rename "nvidia" to "nv", startx, then simply go to nvidia.com and download the drivers there, and install the manually. That actually worked out quite well. -- samh1974 05:26, 15 Feb 2007 (CST)

Legacy drivers

The Section on legacy drivers does not address 10.2. Does 10.2 support the installation of legacy drivers? After installing 10.2, I followed the Nvidia Installation Guide to install a NVIDIA Legacy driver (7182). (I had already installed a Legacy driver on a machine running 10.1, so I thought I knew what I was doing.) When I tried to execute the installation file (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7182-pkg1.run) using the sh command, the software attempted to compile against my kernel (2.6.18.8-0.3) but reported that it could not find the kernel source. I couldn't either, so I installed the source myself (yast2 -i kernel-source). I found kernel.h, the kernel source file that the installation file looks for, and supplied its path to the installation file using the --kernel-source-path command line option. The installation software returned the message "Unable to determine version of source" and aborted. H

I would guess that you did one step too much and with a wrong path. You used standard installation procedure and kernel is installed in standard directory (on any Linux) /usr/src/linux that nvidia installer knows about, so option --kernel-source-path=/usr/src/linux is not necessary.

Second problem might be that you have to run as root

cd /usr/src/linux
make cloneconfig 
make prepare

Newer driver installers do this, older don't. --Rajko M 15:16, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Check Installation in 10.3

How can I check if the installation was successfull in 10.3? Still if it shows the Nvidia logo on startup?--Zukunftcom 10:20, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Uninstallation

The uninstallation instructions aren’t optimal:

• the rpm grep does not suffice, since the package fusion-icon must be uninstalled as well
• sax2 -a does not necessarily do as expected; I had to do nvidia-xconfig to get things right.

It is probably easier to point people to YaST, tell them to uninstall compiz/compiz-fusion and let it do the settings, then restart X server. Hamaryns 14:51, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Get your openSuse 11.1 Beta 4 NVIDIA drivers

Hi,

There is a new beta NVIDIA 173.14.15 driver available over at ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/173.14.15/

I guess these will work on most NVidIA graphics cards. Compositing works really well.

This driver worked a treat for me. I have an Athlon Thunderbird (!) and after upgrading to OpenSUSE 11.0, I got this message when trying to run mythfrontend (or any OpenGL app, I guess):

NVIDIA OpenGL Driver requires CPUs with SSE to run.

The current CPU does not support SSE.

This is because for a while now NVidia drivers have only supported SSE capable CPUs. The work-around used to be install an older driver (e.g. 100.14.19) that doesn't require SSE, but that won't compile on 2.6.25 kernels.

With 173.14.15 NVidia have re-enabled support for non-SSE CPUs (bless them) so I can run MythTV again. See http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122423 for the announcement. SandorZoo 13:20, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

openSUSE 11.1 on Acer Aspire 7520

I updated my openSUSE 10.3 to 11.1 on the 22.02.2009, including the Nvidia drivers and my display looked great! However, the machine's network performance was very poor due to the IPv6 issue. In an attempt to solve this problem, I re-installed and then discovered that one-click was updated on the 23.02 and no longer provided the correct drivers for my Acer. When I now try to install, Yast says: 'nothing provides kernel(trace:mm) = 67506958a8c60f3c needed by nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-trace-180.29-2.6.27.18_0.3-0.1.x86_64' My kernel is 2.6.27.7-9-default and it seems to me that the driver is for a later kernel which I don't have. How do I solve this? My graphics card is a GeForce 7000M.--richj 09:30, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Kernel version mismatches can cause One-click/Repository methods to become the “Hard Way”

Executive summary: The kernel version against which the nvidia driver is built doesn’t match the version numbers of the available kernels. Results in the one-click and repository method not working. The “Hard Way” becomes in fact the easiest way and the title of the section should be changed to something like “The Manual Way” to stop perpetuating the myth that using the terminal automatically means doing something will be difficult.

I’ve been a linux user for some time (as far back as SUSE 8.x which was the first time I tried Linux). In this time I have learnt that when using especially nVidia and ATI cards, I do not expect the proprietary drivers to work off the bat when installation completes. So with this in mind, after installing 11.1 I thought to myself I suspect all I will have to do is: 1. Google – opensuse nvidia 2. Follow one of the links 3. Most likely it will require setting up a repo and installing via yast

You may imagine I wasn’t surprised when this was one of the solutions provided. So I setup my local repos and the nvidia repos and thought let’s get going. So I was a little taken aback when this did not work. So I thought well let me go the one-click route. Again this surprised me when it didn’t work (I didn’t use the main community repo but the local one, used the official nvidia repo). So I was stuck with the vesa driver.

I set about scouring google for what might be the problem here. A little over an hour later the problem hadn’t been resolved. I was at the same time setting up various parts of the system. It was running rpm –qa | grep nvidia (or it may have been rpm –qa | grep kernel) when I noticed something. The nVidia driver installed had a different version number to the kernel running. And at no stage had yast pointed this out to me. So I went looking through the kernels available (for 64-bit) and noticed none of them matched the kernel version against which the nvidia driver was built.

It was at this point that I thought I guess this means the hard way for me. I got the second surprise of the night. The hard way is not hard at all. In fact I think it is the kind of thing that leads to perceptions about linux not being user friendly. By admittedly my laziness to start up a terminal, what could have taken me 5 minutes ended up taking more than an hour because of wanting to go the “easy” route.

The point of this long essay is really that SUSE is doing itself and linux in general no favours by pertuating the myth that doing things using a terminal equates to being a difficult process. With that in mind, I would advocate changing that section to something like The Terminal Route or The Manual Way.

Thanks if you read this and got this far.

Very old NVIDIA chipsets

The en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA page indicates in a number of places that "Legacy cards" include Geforce 4 and older, TNT. Actually TNT and some other old cards are not supported by the drivers in the repository. The oldest driver there is 96.43.11 and it does not support RIVA TNT-2, for example. According to NVIDIA site these very old chips are only supported by the driver version 71.86.11. I do not think this driver supports new kernels for 11.2 yet. Probably it is better to remove reference to TNT cards from the above page and refer users to nvidia.com.