Hello,

I have an old Gateway G6-450 with an Nvidia Riva TNT graphics card.

I am very confused, and would appreciate some advise...

I'm currently running openSuse 10.3.

When I try to compile the Nvidia driver for this card

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-71.86.04-pkg1.run -q
followed by
sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia

everything appears to be "fine" when in GUI mode. However, the second I exit SAX2, my screen becomes a "mess" (all sorts of strange shapes, colors, etc).

As I mentioned, when I am in runlevel 5, the display appears to be ok (as well as during the initial boot of Suse 10.3, when pressing Escape for more information). During shutdown, the screen becomes a "mess" again.

When I use sax2 with 0=nv, I do not experience this issue.

Has anyone else experienced a similar problem? Should I be using the nvidia or nv driver? If the former, do I need to do any "tweaking" to fix the runlevel 3 problem?

This leads me to my next problem... I am trying to update to Suse 11.0. However, no matter what display mode I choose (except for Text & VESA, which provide text that reminds me of a VIC-20), I have a similar problem as mentioned above -- I cannot read the screen due to weird shapes & colors on it. This occurs no matter what option I choose from the Suse 11 menu (I cannot even perform a media check).

When I select a menu option, I get a progress bar of "Loading Kernal", followed by really big text (I don't recall exactly what the text reads), followed by the "messed-up" screen.

From what I can tell, it appears that Opensuse11 is using some sort of NVidia graphics driver that is incompatible with the RIVA TNT card.

Any thoughts on how I can "force" the nv driver (for example) when trying to install Suse11 ?

I realize that this post could have been posted in a number of forums (Hardware, etc), but I didn't know which category it would best fit.

Thanks

-Dan

You can always select the nv driver from yast?


For the proprietary nvidia driver on suse...see the nvidia page for that.

disable /uninstall that first

Also

#man atieventsd

Thank you for your reply.

Here is an update -- I found a thread that mentioned how to do a "Live Update" from 10.3 to 11.0, so I figured that I would follow the instructions & hope for the best.

After several hours, it finished & I did an init 6.

The boot screen is all "Garbage", as mentioned above -- until it gets to the logon screen. Everything seems to be "fine" when I am at runlevel 5. But, if I boot to runlevel 3 (or issue an init 3), I get garbage.

My video driver is currently nv -- I have not tried changing that.

It seems as though the linux kernel itself may be what is causing the video issue.

Hopefully I'll be able to resolve this issue soon...

I bought 2 video cards on eBay for short money... one is an ATI (which I haven't tried yet, nor probably will at this point), and the second is a TNT2 Pro 64 (which was incorrectly advertised as a GeoForce), which I installed.

That card fixed the video display issue.