Video card driver [solved]

[AussieJohn]

After installing 2008-Spring last week I installed a new Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4 Mainboard to include an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor. The reinstall was to make certain of no hardware glitches. The board and the CPU are operating flawlessly. This means I can now run my two SATA II HDDs at the SATA II mode instead if basic SATA mode. At last I can also boot up using my Sata LG DVD-r/rw burner, which I couldn't do with my ASUS A7V600X board. All is well thus far.

 

All of this also required a new Video card since the AGP original is not transferable to the new board. I bought the Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B ......NVIDIA 9600 GT / PCI-E 2.0 with 512MB GDDR3.

 

So far I have had no luck installing either the Proprietary NVIDIA driver or the dma Mandriva drivers. In both cases they appear to install AOK but when logging out and back in to give effect to the install, it automatically goes to a log in screen and use of kde or startx does not work.

Rebooting does not fix it either. I can only get back in by using Vim and editing xorg. conf to read "nv" again instead of "nvidia".

 

Exactly the same happens to my reinstalled 2008-Free as well so the problem would seem certain to be the driver and not th OSs.

 

Is Mandriva aware of this bug and has anyone else had similar problems???. Or have I bought myself a dud, or a lemon???.

 

Cheers.

[Greg2]

Is Mandriva aware of this bug

Here's the bug report: #39452

 

Here are the beta driver rpms that some are using: /testing/nvidia/cooker/i586/

[AussieJohn]

Thanks greg, I will have a try at that and see if it works.

 

Cheers. John

[adamw]

As noted on the bug, the latest non-beta NVIDIA driver does not support this card. 2008 Spring should have detected it in its own group and used 'nv', not 'nvidia', for it. Was this not the case, or did you attempt to switch to the proprietary driver manually?

[AussieJohn]

Hello Adam.

It is running with /xorg.conf as nv at the moment which of course means no hardware acceleration so it won't run OpenGL Screensavers.

As mentioned earlier I tried both the proprietary nvidia driver and the install method that I have used for a couple of years. It seemed to install without error but on reboot would not run so I had to use vim to edit back to nv again to get back in.

 

I also used the new method of using the Mandriva nvidia driver and dkms and so on for 96xx and again with no seeming error but same problem logging out and in.

This was the method I used for install since it worked well with my former fx5200 card.

 

The problem is the same for both 2008-Free (where I am at the moment) and also 2008-Spring.

 

Cheers. John.

[adamw]

As I said, that's not a 'problem' per se. The current stable proprietary driver from NVIDIA simply does not support this card. I know about this, so I set 2008 Spring to detect all the 9xxx cards I have IDs for, and make it not offer the proprietary driver as an option for them. I wanted to know if that was working.

 

The fact that the proprietary driver doesn't work with the card is not a bug as far as we (Mandriva) are concerned, that's up to NVIDIA. As soon as they ship a stable release of the driver that *does* work with the card, we'll push it as a backport for 2008 and 2008 Spring.

[AussieJohn]

Once again thanks Adam. I reckon I can wait for the fix. :D :D

[AussieJohn]

Hi to Adam in particular and to the poster, Scoonma, who made me aware of the new release.

 

I just downloaded the latest driver from NVIDIA and Installed it on both 2008-Free and 2008-Spring.

Works AOK.

 

Had one early hassle.....The GeForce 9600 GT Video card has a twin power connectors on a single plug that goes into the Card. I have both of these connected to the same power cable from the Power Supply. I am not sure whether this should be the case and will take it up with Gigabyte. When I did startx, the error message made reference to the power connectors to the card saying that the power connector leads to the Card were not detected and suggested that if they were then maybe add the .....Option "NoPowerConnectorCheck" be added to the video part of /etc/X11/zorg.conf.

I did that in both 2008-Free and 2008-Spring and now have Open GL screensavers working meaning that 3D acceleration is now working.

 

When the Mandriva organised driver comes out, I will try it out too but either way I am home and hosed so far as the New Video Card is concerned which is a tremendous relief.

 

Cheers. John.

Edited April 15, 2008 by AussieJohn

[adamw]

the beta driver is in Cooker already, and the detection tables updated. however, as I noted, we won't backport it to stable releases; we only backport stable releases of NVIDIA, not beta ones. :)

[AussieJohn]

Okeydoke. Thanks Adam.

 

John.

[AussieJohn]

Further to the note about needing to insert.....Option "NoPowerConnectorCheck" be added to the video part of /etc/X11/zorg.conf.

 

It is no longer needed. The twin 4 pin molex connector leads that terminate in a 6 pin plug which (the 6pin plug) plugs into the end of the Video card has 3 wires (yellow, black and red) into each molex. The red wire was not connected to its usual no.4 pin but to no.3 instead.

 

After 4 days of no response from Gigabyte to clarify the situation I moved the red wires to the no.4 positions. This seemed to work ok except it required the solution I put into effect.

 

I still had doubts so I chased up a couple of computer technicians and they told me the card doesn't use 5 volts and only 12 volt and BOTH leads have to be connected to the power supply cables. Although the leads are red they are actually the same as the black leads, namely common or return. I returned the pins to their original positions and reinstalled them, rebooted and all still worked so then deleted the added option in xorg.conf and rebooted. Worked like a charm.

 

Have since done a clean reinstall of both 2008-Free and also 2008-Spring and installed the nvidia proprietary driver on both OSs. Both are running perfectly

 

Still haven't heard from Gigabyte. Same old same old.

 

Cheers. John.

Edited April 21, 2008 by AussieJohn