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