nvidia 7174 widescreen laptop 2.6.x xorg = "black screen"
 

After numerous distribution changes over the last six months and various playing around, I have still not been able to use the official nvidia driver since version 6111. It seems that Nvidia disabled WXGA widescreen support in newer drivers? Is this true? After setting up my config like I always did for <=6111 drivers, I only get a "black screen" when X starts up! I know that it starts up, because I hear the little Ubuntu "drum roll" sound at the login prompt. So why is the screen black/blank?

Does anyone sucessfully have a 2.6.x kernel, running Xorg, with >=6629 nvidia drivers, on a WXGA widescreen LCD laptop display? If so, speak up! I want to know your config. If not, don't try to lecture me on what should work. I want to weed out the frivilous replies. Hopefully someone will come to this thread and resolve the issue and later viewers will be able to learn from it.

Kristian Hermansen
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This is on a Ubuntu Hoary system, but also didn't work on Gentoo...

Here is the answer from Flonne in channel #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net:

sudo echo "options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=0 NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0" >> /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc

I don't know why it works, but it does. Give Flonne a round of applause!

Kristian Hermansen

It depends on the Modeline not the module (driver) if you only see a blank screen while going into runlevel 5 or 4 (GUI). If you know the specs of the LCD monitor, you can add some modelines. If you do not know the specs of your LCD monitor, you can use knoppix and designate the resolution. Then look for the XF86Config or xorg.conf file in knoppix and copy the modelines in your XF86Config or xorg.conf.

Well, I have tried numerous modelines to no avail. Also, this seems to be a >=6629 driver issue -- since everything worked fine before that version appeared.

Apparently the guy I talked to said this hack has helped many people before me, so I trust that it does not have anything to do with the modeline in fact. He tells me the issue has something to do with some probing that is being done. He also tells me that setting that above value to zero clears things up, because with a default value of three, things get weird. If you know something that I don't, please point me to some documentation to verify your claim ;-)

Kristian Hermansen

I hav the same problem, by toshiba satellite 3000-601 always froze when I started X11 with driver >=6111
after reading this post and the README shipped with the drivers, I did the following:
1) ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1.run --extract-only
2) cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1/usr/src/nv
3) edit os-registry.c
4) make
5) cd ../../..
6) ./nvidia-installer
7) life long and prosper...

hth,
Florian