Hi, Thank you for your help. Finally, I got it working now. I followed Carls approach with two main differences. I needed the latest driver patches from nvidia (28.02.2005 comulative patch) and I told the sax2 that there is no generic device, but a Geforce 6600 Nvidia graphics card. After this the xserver is starting up properly, but after X was started I cann't get back to text mode. Anyways, it works now. I'll see if I can get textmode working. It may be better on a development machine ;) best regards Matthias -----Original Message----- From: Hänel Matthias [mailto:mhaenel@baumeroptronic.de] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 6:32 PM To: 'suse-amd64@suse.com' Subject: [suse-amd64] Re: SuSE 9.2 AMD64 installation Hello, thank you to all of you for your answers. Actually, I tried Carl's approach, but it didn't work for me :( I am still not able to enter X, because the X-Server tells me it doesn't find the device. That's pretty weird since it's the latest drivers and yast/sax2 is able to find the PCIe-device. Probably, it's a problem with this special graphics chipset, because it's not the high end one, but the low end version Geforce 6200. The Patch CD_RC3 does something weird, it installs pretty fine through yast and through it's bootup installer, but it destroys the kernel. When I reboot my pc, the reiserfs.ko isn't found anymore and the system stopps booting. So, I'll going to try the approch with recompiling the xorg. I don't need any 3D-enhancement, but I need just 1024x768 ;) Hopefully, that works. best regards Matthias -----Original Message----- From: Carl Zeilon [mailto:pclinux@charter.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 3:27 PM To: Hänel Matthias; 'suse-amd64@suse.com' Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] SuSE 9.2 AMD64 installation At 03:26 AM 3/2/2005, you wrote:

Hi,

we bought a brand new AMD64-PC with a AMD64 3200, ASUS A8V-E Deluxe and a Geforce 6200 (MSI NX 6200) with 1 GBytes of RAM a Seagate SATA 160 GB harddrive. Actually, we ran into problems while installation. First we were trying with the DVD-Installation (Manual, Install, Install without ACPI, Install safe) the results are always the same. The systems locks up with a beep directly after yast is initialized but not started. Therefore we were trying a real old PCI graphics controller with S3 chipset and we got the same lockup. Then I read here on the list there is a patch CD that solves these SATA problems. Today we tried this new installation CD (Patch_CD_RC3). Actually we got no new results, always this lockup right before yast is starting. So,we tried to disable USB, Firewire, ACPI in the BIOS with no significant result. No ACPI results in "normal installation" locks earlier but installation with "noacpi" still locks before yast. Actually, we tried SUSE 9.1 (64) with the same result. The last test we did was an installation of a pretty old dist (SUSE 8.0 32-Bit) to prove the hardware. This test was successfully. That means the hardware works properly but not with newer distributions. Does anyone realized some problems like this? Is there a solution for this problem?

Thank you in advance.

with best regards Matthias Hänel

I will relate some great advice I received from John Storrs on this list & add some of my own comments: "This is a known problem, due to a bug in XOrg PCI-Express code in the SuSE 9.2 distribution. I've just worked around it, with help from Andreas on this list (thread 9.2 AMD64 Install CD with New Kernel - see most recent postings) and from postings to the Nvidia Linux Forum (thread Cursor missing and/or corrupt icon, AMD64/PCIe/FC3/6629). See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2322 for details of the bug. The lockup occurs (I think) when YaST attempts to start the xorg vga driver, which excites the bug. The workaround, as Andreas advised, is to do a text mode install. When the linuxrc screen shows on bootup, press F2 and select 'Text Mode'. **Configure the default run level to 3** (no X) or you'll have problems later. I installed from the SuSE 9.2 DVD (I didn't find that Andreas' CD with New Kernel helped with this bug). I got the latest NVidia graphics driver from www.nvidia.com (might be on Andreas' CD too). I dealt with this install entirely off-line, so I had to download the driver on another system and put it on a CD to transfer and install it. Now the tricky bit. You need an /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the default 'Device' entry using the new 'nvidia' driver, with the options: Option "SWCursor" "on" Option "NoRenderExtension" "on" This is difficult to achieve because of the bug. **I did it by running 'sax2 -m 0=vga' (that's zero=vga) to get an initial xorg.conf (don't let the graphics test run, or the system will lock up).** I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf, changing 'vga' to 'nvidia', and adding the options shown above. I then daringly did 'init 5' to start X. That gave me a viable X display and KDE, and I could run YaST from the KDE menu to improve the graphics configuration. Finally I dealt with the large bootup console font by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst: replace "console=tty0" with "vga=0x31a". " Key points: Press F2 & do a text install. Set run level to 3 (you can also type "3" as a boot argument if you miss it). Use YaST (text mode) to get "Kernel Sources" & "gcc" which are necessary for the Nvidia driver. I updated my system using YaST online update at this point. Download the latest Nvidia driver on another machine & copy to a CD. Copy the driver to your new box & install the Nvidia driver with sh command. Run "sax2 -m 0=vga" (that's zero=vga) & finalize. Do Not Test! Edit your etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Under "Device", change "vga" to "nvidia" & add Option "SWCursor" "on" Option "NoRenderExtension" "on" Now you can switch to run level 5 & cross your fingers. Using the "vesa, nv, or the YaST nvidia driver for graphics all resulted in a locked machine. Be sure to only start X when using "vga" or "nvidia". It took me many, many tries to get this right - don't give up. email if you get stuck. Good luck, Carl -- Check the List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe For additional commands, email: suse-amd64-help@suse.com