Guest jvslice Posted February 1, 2003 Report Share Posted February 1, 2003 Before I start, this is not a flame war. I have a Athlon-XP 1800+ (1.53 Ghz) Processor with 512 Meg Ram Visiontek GeForce2 Titanium-200 64MB DDR AGP Video Card Initially I had mandrake 8.2 load on my box and none of the video playback packages would work correctly, either as a stream or file on disk. What was happening was during the running of the clip, the display window would turn light blue. If paused the frame would display properly. Due to my work, I was not able to look into this problem. When Redhat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 came out, I tried both on an older box that I have, and found that I was able to run Redhat for the first time, without having to manually configue X. So what the heck, put Redhat on my big box. After downloading xmovie, xine, and ogle. Web streams worked correctly, by unable to view DVDs, most likely not having the proper Codex loaded. I next decided to go back to Mandrake (another story) and try again. Everything with Mandrake is just wonderful, execpt that 9.0 has the same problems as 8.2. This time I plan to fix the problem and stay with Mandrake. Mandrake has Identified the graphics card as NV17 Geforce4 MX 440 using the Geforce 2 DDR (generic) driver. I have not used drivers from nvidia in either Redhat or Mandrake. Whenever I ask the questions on what to do (Not Here), I get the same response, RTFM and install nvidia drives. Finally, comes the question!!!! Since I have both an Athlon processor, and a nvidia graphic card, should I recompile the kernel, beforefore loading nvidia drivers, or is there something else that I should check before I redo the kernel for my first time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted February 1, 2003 Report Share Posted February 1, 2003 install the nvidia drivers, the instructions for them are on the nvidia page. you shouldn't have to do anything else, just installing the drivers works for me my setup: AMD XP 1600+ w/Geforce 4 ti4200, and previously a Geforce 2 GTS i've never had to recompile the kernel, but the nvidia drivers definitely do make a difference in various areas :) hope thats what you needed to know! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 jvslice Welcome to the Mandrake users board. Just to make you feel more comfortable, "flame wars" are not tolerated here, and seldom happen. Also, you have as much chance as being told to "RTFM" as winning the lottery. Welcome to the forum with the nicest bunch of people you could hope to meet. The answer above, should be OK for you, But for the best results, rebuild the nvidia kernel from source. rebuilding the glx is not needed. Plenty of instructions on how to do this are available on the nvidia home page, or do a search on this site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 This is not just a RTFM but in the Tutorials section at the top of the page there are two for installing Nvidia drivers. The first in Installation by Madhatter deals specifically with Mandrake 9. The second under Hardware is a generic one for Linux (the second). There is a third there by DOlson which is a 404 at the time this is being written but it should be corrected overnight. There is a detailed decription of compiling the kernel in the old docs also at the top of the page in Installation>Kernel Upgrade. The answer to the question about making the kernel specific to Athlon has been discussed here before with people coming down on both sides, yes it makes a difference, no it doesn't. Do a search of the messages to pull up the threads. It has also been discussed in the newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandrake. Do a Google Advanced group search with "Athlon kernel" as the main search term with "9.0" as a modifier. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 should I recompile the kernel, beforefore loading nvidia drivers,Yes, because nvidia drivers are kernel specific. If you install NVIDIA, then compile the kernel, the NVdriver will not be found;/lib/modules/2.4.19-16mdk/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o when you boot to the new kernel. Since you can only have one NVIDIA_kernel and one NVIDIA_GLX installed, if you then switch back to the default kernel or rebuild another then you have to uninstall and reinstall again. I've never done it with the binaries from nvidia.com because I always rebuild them from src and put them in a /home/kernel-x.x.x (version) folder, so just continue to use XFree86's nv 2D driver until after you compile the kernel. One suggestion on the kernel compile...on mdk kernels, always make mrproper as the first step before make xconfig (or menuconfig). Happy kerneling :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 ,Since I have both an Athlon processor, and a nvidia graphic card, should I recompile the kernel, beforefore loading nvidia drivers, or is there something else that I should check before I redo the kernel for my first time. Since u r currently using mandrake-9.0, u can run dmesg to view kernel messages. I have a AMD duron and I get this kernel message: Advanced speculative caching feature not present This means my system has no chance of being affected by the athlon/agpgart incoherence bug. Since u have an athlon CPU + nvidia AGP card, if u use the nvidia binary drivers, these are the possibilities: 1. If u disable AGP, this problem cannot occur. 2. If u enable AGP, run dmesg and see if the kernel has to say about the speculative caching feature. Its likely that the kernel will use some specific options to deal with the issue. The appendix F of http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86_40/1.0-3123/README says: o Support for the processor's Page Size Extension on Athlon Processors Some linux kernels have a conflicting cache attribute bug that is exposed by advanced speculative caching in newer AMD Athlon family processors (AMD Athlon XP, AMD Athlong 4, AMD Athlon MP, and Models 6 and above AMD Duron). This kernel bug usually shows up under heavy use of accelerated 3D graphics with an AGP graphics card. Linux distributions based on kernel 2.4.19 and later *should* incorporate the bug fix. But, older kernels require help from the user in ensuring that a small portion of advanced speculative caching is disabled (normally done through a kernel patch) and a boot option is specified in order to apply the whole fix. Nvidia's driver automatically disables the small portion of advanced speculative caching for the affected AMD processors without the need to patch the kernel; it can be used even on kernels which do already incorporate the kernel bug fix. Additionally, for older kernels the user performs the boot option portion of the fix by explicitly disabling 4MB pages. This can be done from the boot command line by specifying: mem=nopentium Or by adding the following line to etc/lilo.conf: append = "mem=nopentium" Since mandrake-9.0 uses a 2.4.19 kernel, things should be fine. If not, use the specified boot option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php...ighlight=athlon if you decide to rebuild the NVIDIA driver, from the link above; rpmbuild --rebuild --target=athlon package.src.rpm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jvslice Posted February 2, 2003 Report Share Posted February 2, 2003 Thanks to all. Decided to just go with the Nvidia drivers without recompiling the kernel. This fixed my problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JaseP Posted February 3, 2003 Report Share Posted February 3, 2003 You are better off just doing what you did. Re-compiling the kernel for a video issue is un-necessary. Plenty of people will help you out. Some even host sites with re-built drivers for you to use if there is a driver problem. With nVidia cards, there is sometimes a conflict with the chipsets on the motherboard. Generally, this is fixed by using AGPgart instead of nVidia's built-in AGP support. Sometimes, though, like in the case of the ALi 1541 chipset, using AGPgart isn't 100%, you must sometimes use older drivers which aren't set to fail if the driver detects the ALi 1541 or you must re-compile the drivers to function with the chipset. You really need to read the nVidia documentation. It helps tremendously. But don't feel afraid to ask a "stupid" question. Sometimes people will flame you for asking a question that's been asked 100 times before, if you have not done a search about it,... but even that is rare. The people on this board will generally bend over backwards to help you. We look at every Linux, and specifically Mandrake, convert as a bonus to the installed user base that's out there, and one step closer to Linux being THE (or at least one of the) dominant desktop OS... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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