Which Nvidia driver?

tophee · 14 Oct 2008 at 22:07

Hi guys,
Recently I've been playing with Kubuntu 8.4. I decided to change back to Gnome and ran into some hardware issues. I've a FX5200 card which just falls over once I've installed the nvidia driver. I've tried to change which driver I am using - through the add/remove options but I'm still getting problems. Which basically entails no eye-candy (plenty with Compiz under KDE), but when enabling the driver, I get a black screen on reboot, then have to revert back to the generic driver to get anything.
While Google is my friend, I've not turned up a solution that actually fixes this.

Can anyone suggest anything. In the meantime I'll be trying some other distros, but it bugs the hell out of me when things don't work, but should.
Ta.
Chris

yashiro · 14 Oct 2008 at 23:05

You can't run into hardware issues as such, just by changing Window/Theme managers. If it worked on KDE it should work on Gnome (under Xorg).

Turn off Desktop Effects.
Run this under whatever working driver you're using, so you're working from a clean slate

Code:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Reboot, then try installing the latest Nvidia driver.

tophee · 15 Oct 2008 at 10:45

mmn, you're right I shouldn't run into issues, but once I initialise a nvidia driver, I get a black screen and it seems to be for all three that are available by the add/remove option.
If I try to get the eye-candy to work I get a little popup syaing the option could not be initialised.
I'll have a look this evening or tomorrow. (Very busy atm.)

Thanks tho!

Chris

Septh · 15 Oct 2008 at 16:45

Try using envy to reinstall the driver and set it all up for you?

yashiro · 15 Oct 2008 at 17:30

You could install EnvyNG after you've re-configured Xorg, yeah.

tophee · 15 Oct 2008 at 19:13

Actually, I'm beginning to think the card is borked.
Just tried Mandriva and on the graphics test... fell over.

yashiro · 15 Oct 2008 at 19:48

I wouldn't call any 'graphics test' in Linux conclusive of anything.

The only thing worse than Video driver functionality in Linux is Audio!

tophee · 22 Oct 2008 at 19:10

Well, I finally got around to running sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and installing the nvidia driver with envy... and reboot = black screen. One more try and it's a different graphics card for me. I have another fx5200 in a different machine that is not in use. Fortunately.

tophee · 23 Oct 2008 at 18:49

Well, after all that, I swapped the gpu, and it all worked. Bit of a relief really.