Solved: nvidia driver quit working

[bigmac60]

I added more main memory and when I rebooted my video was huge. I could make it usable
with ctrl alt + or -. I restarted in recovery mode and ran xfix. Then everything looked ok but it was
using the nv driver. Hardware drivers manager would not activate the nvidia driver so I ran nvidia-
xconfig. When I restart I get a black screen when I should be seeing kdm. The card is a nvidia mx4000
and the driver I was using that worked before the memory upgrade was 96.43.09. Intrepid sees the
added memory and everything works except the nvidia driver. When I get the black screen the
system is locked up except alt-sysrq reisub will restart it.

If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be grateful....I think.

bob

[dibl]

Re: nvidia driver quit working

sudo apt-get install envyng-qt

sudo envyng -t

Follow the menu.

[bigmac60]

Re: nvidia driver quit working

Thank you for your reply. I don't
think envy will install beta driver
96.43.09. So far I'm still using the
nv driver. I did sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
and hope it will install from synaptic the
same as what it did when I first installed
it. I wonder if there's anything else I
should remove. I would like to know
what it was about increasing ram
that tanked the driver. When I get
a moment I'll try reinstalling and if
envy would install the 96.43.09 driver
I would try that.

thanks again

bob

[dibl]

Re: nvidia driver quit working

Nvidia's web site says the latest driver for the GeForce 4 MX series is 96.43.07. I would expect EnvyNG to ID your card correctly and install that driver, but you also have the option of downloading the driver from Nvidia's web site here:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Make sure you select the 32-bit or 64-bit architecture appropriately. Also you need to install the build-essential package and the linux-headers-`uname -r` packages before you try to run the downloaded installer.

[bigmac60]

Re: nvidia driver quit working

I was using the 96.43.09 beta driver that's listed in one of ppa's or backports. I did
get everything going again this afternoon. These are the steps I took. I booted into
recovery mode and ran xfix which activated the nv driver and then I had a gui back.
I uninstalled all the nvidia stuff with 'sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*'. I then installed with
synaptic nvidia-glx-96(96.43.09 driver), nvidia-settings, and nvidia-96-modaliases.
Because Hardware driver did not activate the driver I ran nvidia-xconf which enabled
the driver. Then I had to restore the previous working xorg.conf file and edit the kwinrc
file while logged in with icewm to re-enable desktop effects.

I was surprised and happy to see it work as it did before I added more memory. This
may have been the hard way but it was my way. I hope they get the open source
nvidia 3d driver going so that some of these problems will get easier.

Thanks for the suggestions.

bob

[barbolani]

Re: Solved: nvidia driver quit working

bigmac60, I always assumed that the nv driver did not support 3d acceleration. Has the situation changed or is there other open source driver that supports 3D?

[bigmac60]

Re: Solved: nvidia driver quit working

The Nouveau project is trying to reverse engineer a 3d
driver for nvidia. Last I looked they have a ways to go.
If they get it going that would make most of the nvidia
driver problems go away.