nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

That sounds quite interesting. I suppose you work with spectrograms? Coolio!

I know what you mean about the simulations... I used to be such a nov at electrical stuff that I used to find out how idiotic my ambitions were all the time by sitting at LTSpice and watching nothing happen. Since I've been on DIYAudio, however, I have started to unlearn all the crazy things I used to believe about electronics! Now I believe I am well on my way to becoming a good designer

I am currently downloading Kubuntu Edgy Eft and I will soon burn it with DeepBurner free. This is how I burned my last CD (not the first one I was talking about) and it worked. The first CD I had of Kubuntu was from a nice friend who was kind enough to enlighten me on the involving philosophy of Linux. I have had my head in the clouds ever since.

-keantoken

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Okay, I tried Edgy, and it just ran command line from the disk and when I typed "x", it said that there was an initialization error and couldn't start because "no screens with usable config" and obviously it was trying to use the ATI drivers. Is there any way that I can fix the drivers in Edgy in command at startup during installation? I don't have Kubuntu installed originally on my disk because I traded my drives around and finally got my 10 and 8GB drives working together. Could I install if I fixed the drivers on disk-boot and then ran the X thingy and installed?

The bootup screen looks a lot more flashy now.

- keantoken

[Tynach]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

O_O That sounds like an awsome job! What type of program do you use?

[askrieger]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

@keantoken: The correct way to start X ftom the console is to use the command "startx" (just another one of those obscure Unix names that the experts use to confuse newbies). However, I suspect that it wouldn't have done you any good. It looks as if the xserver is not finding your nvidia card. From the console run the command "lspci". This will detect all the devices that are atached to the PCI bus. You should have TWO lines that say something like

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV<whatever>

and

00:01.1 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon <whatever>

. If you only see one (the ATI line) your problem may be as simple as the nVidia card needs to be jiggled in it's socket , or it may be dead. If you see two lines referring to the two display controller, write down the numbers that start the 2 lines.

Now (still in the console, if X didn't start) enter the command "less /etc/X11/xorg.conf". If you get the response "less: command not found", enter the command "more /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Less is a more powerful file reading program than more, but I can't remember whether it's included by default, or if you have to install it separately. Tap the space bar to scroll down through the file until you get to a stanza that looks like

Section "Device"
Identifier "Nvidia <blah, blah>"
Driver "nv"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

or

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies<blah, blah>
Driver "ati"
BusID "PCI:2:1:1"
EndSection

If lspci showed both devices on the bus, but the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file shows only one display device (and it's the ati) you've found your problem. In this case my guess would be that the Edgy installer didn't see the nVidia card. In addition to jiggling the card, your going to have to iinstall the nvidia driver.

If you haven't expended a lot of time and energy customizing your system, you might be better off by just re-installing once you are sure that the nVidia card is in place and working. Probably, the best way to verify that you don't have a hardware problem is to check it out in windoze. I can't help you there because I haven't gone into windoze in months, and it's even longer since I used the System Information system or whatever it's called.

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Thanks, askrieger

I am running windows right now and I am not having any problems with my card.

I will try your instructions and see what I can do. Wish me the best!

Tynach,

Which one were you talking to?
I am assuming that you are talking to askrieger. It sound pretty interesting, since digital optics and stuff is supposed to be the future... I know a little about optics (what you can get out of a college physics book). For acceptance angles are you talking about the angle range in which a beam of light will not reflect off of a transparent medium?

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Okay,

I got as far as editing the xorg.conf... and... How do you use Less?

I believe that I can do this as soon as I know.

Thanks guys!

- keantoken

[askrieger]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Less is not an editor, it's just a file reader. To use it for reading a file, just give the command "less <file-to-read>". To navigate, Spacebar moves down a page, 'd' moves down half a page and 'u' moves up a half page. 'q' exits, and 'h' opens a help file. How many Device entries did you find? And, do you see both video adapters with lspci? If so, what are their addresses?

@Tynach: I program the simulation software in Fortran. When I started working with interference filters about 20-25 years ago, there was no public domain s/w for simulating filters and the proprietary programs were all intended for use in designing things like simple anti-reflection coatings for consumer camera, microscope and binocular lenses. Despite our best efforts, we couldn't persuade anyone to either develop a code for our application or sell us the source code so that we could modify their code for our purposes. So I looked at a standard optics text book and found an explanation of the general method that was simple enough for me to understand. Then I and a graduate student from a neighborhood university roughed out the code one summer. We ran it on a VAX cluster. He took his version of the code to a government lab when he got his degree. At that time, a complex design required a Cray. Fortunately, the lab he went to had one.

I've spent the equivalent of about a man-year over the last two decades, optimizing and extending the code to make it more useful as a design tool. Now, the great, great grandchild of the code that ran in hours on a VAX cluster, runs in minutes on an Athlon64.

Because virtually all of this work was done under government contracts, our code has always been semi-public in the sense that if you know where to look, you can find it, but the government wanted to be asked for permission to publish it, so far in advance of publication that it was nearly impossible to comply. Meanwhile, a guy from Bell Labs published a totally independently developed code in the open literature, that did pretty much the same thing as ours did. So he got semi-famous, and I got to eat on a fairly regular basis. Now that I'm retired, I just fool around with it.

[Tynach]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

That's pretty neat. I hope you don't mind that I asked.

For editing a file, use nano.

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Yes, askrieger

Both devices appear from lspci.
ATI: 01:00.0
nVidia: 02:0a.0

I looked at the xorg.conf and found the place where it displays the driver and video adapter. Yep, it was ATI.

For nano do I use this syntax?

nano <path_and_file>

- keantoken

[askrieger]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

nano <path_and_file>

Yes, the precise command you want is

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then in the xorg.conf file, you want to add (or change the old one)

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Nvidia 5500"
	Driver		"nv"
	BusID		"PCI:2:0a:0"
EndSection

You may have to capitalize the 'a' (I don't know how the xorg.conf parser handles hex numbers). Then you need to find and change the top of the screen section to:

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Device		"Nvidia 5500"
	Monitor		"<whatever>"
	DefaultDepth	24
    Subsection  "Display"
    etc ....

If your system now boots into the GUI you can (a) Enjoy it, or (b) try to get your money's worth from the video card by installing the proprietary driver. You should be able to find instructions for doing that all over this website and the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki, so all I'll do at this point is to hint: Activate your universe and multiverse repositories, then use Synaptic, or Adept (if you must) to search for packages with the word "nvidia" in the name or description.

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

Okay, I'll check it out and see if it works!

Thanks
- keantoken

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

I suppose there is no way to get ISA support in Kubuntu, is there?

I haven't gotten Kubuntu up yet, but I want a way to use my SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold. It is actually a pretty good card! And I want to use it because it actually has it's own on-board processor and doesn't rely heavily on the CPU like the SB Live and the newer ones. It's also the only one I can use right now because I don't have any PC speakers and I have been using the RCA jack outputs on it to send sound to my stereo.

Thanks in advance,
- keantoken

[askrieger]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

I want a way to use my SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold.

You can try to look it up on the Ubuntu Community Support Wiki, but a fast look on my part didn't show anything other than the Audigy.

[keantoken]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

The most important issue I am having independent from the installation is whether Kubuntu supports ISA or it just doesn't recognize my card. From what I could understand of the WIKI, the Audigy cards failed to initialize, or basically weren't detected.

I didn't find anything when I looked up "ISA" or "ISA support", so I'm not sure what to think.

- keantoken

[askrieger]

Re: nVidia Geforce FX 5500 pci support?

@keantoken: I checked the "Audigy" link at the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki and came up with one useful, general tip. The first thing to do is to start a konsole and run the command

cat /proc/asound/cards

If your sound card shows up, you have a fighting chance to make it work. If it doesn't, check this Wiki page. But anything further with regard to the sound cartd should be in another thread.