Of PAE and Nvidia

[LinuxRocks]

Hey all,

I have been bouncing around the 64 bit and 32 bit version of 9.10 and so far, ironically, I find the 32 bit version snappier with multimedia and games than the 64 bit version; I suppose time will mature 64 bit software. Anyhooo...

I also noticed that 9.10 NOW comes with a PAE enabled kernel from the repos all ready to install. This is absolutely great!!! I have installed it in a fresh install and sure enough, all 6 gigs from my laptop are seen and available.

HOWEVER, when I try to install the nvidia driver from the little Proprietary Driver installer, it starts.... then the installer sort of disappears. It copies an xorg.conf to /etc/X11, but when I reboot, I am meet with a black screen and cannot ctrl+alt+f(x) to any terminal... Its just black. I have to boot from the CD and remove the xorg.conf file to get a desktop back.

Now, this doesn't happen with the standard "Generic" kernel in either 32 or 64 bit.

So, I was thinking about installing the driver manually whilst in the PAE kernel, but I fail to find a...

/etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

... anywhere in the disk tree (As per the previous versions instructions)...

So, I guess I have 2 questions...

1> Is there some super secret way of getting the driver to install using a PAE kernel, and...
2> Is there a new way of compiling your Nvidia driver by hand?

Thanks!!!

Joe

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Anyone... Bueller.....Bueller......Bueller......Bueller

Surely there is one among all the gurus here that can help me...

Thanks!!!

Joe

[dibl]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Hey Joe.

OK, I'll try. First, if your hardware platform is 64-bit by design, I'm not sure what you expect to gain by running 32-bit with PAE. The list of true 64-bit problems is a very short one, indeed, and unless you have a particular requirement that doesn't work on a 64-bit platform, I would strongly suggest you just go for the 64-bit OS.

OK, now that I didn't answer your question .....

The "Hardware Drivers" utility doesn't work reliably for me, either. I install the downloaded Nvidia driver. The process as described here:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...4892#msg164892

is the one I use. There is no linux-restricted-modules-common package on my system or in the Kubuntu repo, so that is a non-issue as far as I know.

But, I have not installed on the 32-bit PAE kernel, so your mileage may have a different problem.

You can't compile the Nvidia driver because they do not release the source code -- it contains a "binary blob" -- compiled machine code.

Note: in reviewing the old instruction, note that the new CLI command to stop the X server (9.10 and later) is

sudo service kdm stop

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Thanks for the reply Dibl!!!

The reasons for continuing to use 32bit are small, but I do notice quite a large performance decrease in games that I play that uses Wine. For example... World of Warcraft runs much smoother using the 32 bit version than the 64bit version for some reason. While they both run about the same fps (50-70) consistently, while on 64bits, the game seems "Jerky".

This holds true for Steam based games and also native games such as Doom3 and ETQW.

You are correct in the fact that aside from those issues, 64bit computing on Kubuntu is pretty solid. Its just that I sacrifice a lot to run Linux from the standpoint of games, that I like to get the best possible experience I can .

I will take a look at the website that you posted.

Thanks again for your reply; I really appreciate it !!!

Joe

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia


For what it's worth, I have found that running games in wine works much better on 64-bit jaunty than karmic. Not sure why, but I get lousy performance and frequent crashes on karmic, while jaunty is near perfect.
One reason may be that the 32-bit alsa-lib stuff on karmic is missing several things that are there in jaunty. Also, sound performance is really squirrley on karmic, but works as expected on jaunty. I hope this is just pre-release flakiness.

[jankushka]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

...
if your hardware platform is 64-bit by design, I'm not sure what you expect to gain by running 32-bit with PAE.
...

i'm not sure what hw linuxrocks is on, but x86-64 is not actually 64bits all the way.
it has 64bit integer registers (and other stuff).
but only has 36bits (pae) for physically addressing memory, for example.
x86-64 runs 32bit code as is (not in emulation).
thus, running 32bit codes on such an architecture has no performance implications.
basically, if you're on one of these things, and you've no more than ~3gb or ram, then it makes no difference.
this is ttbomk.
hth

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

I have a Core 2 Duo Intel 64/32 bit chip with 6 gigs ram. I can run 32 bit fine.

My main goal was to get all of my 6 gigs of memory available (HEHE, Like I really use all that anyway) on my laptop I just got. I picked up one of those Asus G71's from Best Buy and didn't really care much fro Vista or Win7. I am very comfortable with Linux and Kubuntu specifically, so I decided to install that.

However, I found out something quite interesting.

When I run 32 bits, I can enable all the screen eye candy from the system config options and play games just fine. I can enable all the eye candy with 64 bits too, however, when I do this, games run like caca. Now, if I disable all the eye candy in 64 bits, then games run top notch.

Would this have to do with the driver (Nvidia) or the X server?

Anyway, I am back on 64 bits, but have desktop eye candy turned off when I play my games.

Love this new verision too... Really slick

Joe

[jankushka]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

i cannot say what the problem with the games thing is.
sorry.
i really am not the right person when it comes to graphical stuff and games in particular.
and i don't have much of experience with 64bit either (i tried a couple of installations).
all i intended to contribute is that a 32 bit os with a pae kernel allows to address 64gb of memory.
and on your cpu, in theory, there's no performance gain in using a 64bit os.
or no performance loss in using a 32bit os.
cheers.

[KeithZG]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Not to be contrary to dibl, and certainly the manual way works fine (it's how I used to do things all the time), but another option is to go the Debian/Ubuntu route and use a repository, in this case a PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~thefirstm/+archive/ppa

You can install the latest Nvidia drivers right from there, along with all the accoutrements. For my projector computer, which runs XBMC from their SVN PPA repository and thus constantly needs the latest and greatest Nvidia drivers (not to mention the latest VDPAU libs and etc), it's a huge time and effort savior.

Sad to hear some performance in WINE has been lost in Karmic 64-bit...but I'll add myself into the group that hopes it's just beta pains

[dibl]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Not to be contrary to dibl, and certainly the manual way works fine (it's how I used to do things all the time), but another option is to go the Debian/Ubuntu route and use a repository, in this case a PPA:

No problem.

Actually, if you really want to go the Debian way, here is the instruction:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10812

[KeithZG]

Re: Of PAE and Nvidia

Not to be contrary to dibl, and certainly the manual way works fine (it's how I used to do things all the time), but another option is to go the Debian/Ubuntu route and use a repository, in this case a PPA:

No problem.

Actually, if you really want to go the Debian way, here is the instruction:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10812

Heh, so we have the manual way, the Ubuntu way, the Debian way . . . ahhh, Linux It really is quite brilliant how we can have such a bewildering array of choices, and a person can just go with exactly whichever one suits them best.