John N. Alegre wrote:
I am starting to question my own sanity when it comes to NVIDIA drivers.
I have been running a SuSE 9.1 Pro system for a year and a half now. I have posted the method I have used to get the NVIDIA drivers working after install or kernel update to others having problems with this. In my hands using YAST to upgrade NVIDIA has never worked.
What I do is to download the shar file from NVIDIA and do:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run (XXXX) being the driver version. sax2 nvidia -m 0=NVIDIA
The version of the drivers that I am using is 6629 but that is not relevant to this comment as both 6629 and 5336 both work fine, WHEN THEY WORK.
OK .. i have seen a situation when I am playing with some alpha version of some graphic game or something where the application will crash and take the NVIDIA drivers with it. The end result is that on boot I never get the splash NVIDIA screen nor ever get the login. I just get a video mess. Going to init=3 and doing the above shell script, sax2 thing has always fixed this.
OK .. on to the story.
About two months ago this happened and for some reason the above sh script / sax2 thing did not work. I tried both the 6629 drivers and the 5336 drivers with no luck. After a day of cursing I just gave up. The machine is used for two things. One is a mail router and the other is a MySQL server. OK, I don't really need a GUI for that. I can ssh in from another machine and do what I need to do. In fact, if I need to do something with a GUI, I can ssh -X in from another linux box or a OS X system and work with the given GUI app just fine. So for the past two months I have been using the machine this way.
Now this machine is the only one I have that has 2 CDs on it. I use it when I burn music CDs for trade which is not that often. Today I brought up K3b on a remote machine and tried to burn a CD. For some reason K3b did not recognize my CD burner as a logical devise. OK, I have seen this before with K3b and I know it goes away after a reboot. So I reboot the machine. I have not tried to reboot it into init 5 for two months. When I gave up on the GUI, I just use init 3 run level. OK, when I reboot for the k3b issue, I forget to type in init 3 on the SuSE splash screen.
Bang, NVIDIA loads and I have X Windows again on this machine.
I don't belive in demons of ghosts, I don't think ??????
Any comments ? john
I had problems similar to yours with my Nvidia card. It would work fine in win me but when I started it in Suse 9.1 sometimes it would work fine and others it would just appear as a shaky jumbled mess. Rebooting would sometimes fix it and then again sometimes it would not. After trying for some time to get it fixed including installing new drivers. Finally I gave up and got another model of Nvidia card. I never had any more problems. Bob Rawlinson