i just installed a new nvidia fx 5600 agp card on my slackware 10 box. i installed the latest ia32 driver from www.nvidia.com/linux and configured my xorg.conf file to use the "nvidia" driver instead of "nv" and set it to load the glx module and not the dri or glcore module. when i try to run X, i get either a black screen and have to restart or i get funny black and white lines that change when i move the mouse and have to restart.

the only (EE) entry i find in my xorg.0.log file is "failed to map memory" or something. most of the time the xorg.conf file and log are corrupted when i restart(the letters are all funny symbols and after i view the file with 'vi', 'cat', or 'more' my shell becomes screwy symbols and i have to restart) and i have to replace xorg.conf with

i have been led to believe that the answer to this problem may somehow involve modelines... can anybody gimmie some help with that? whats a modeline and how do i make some? i dont see any sections in my xorg.conf file about modelines...

can somebody plz help me with this? any input would be appreciated since most of my questions on this forum seem to go unanswered... its really frustrating when i see some guy who posted 5 min ago has 10-15 replies and i've been bumping a post up for a week with 0-3 replies

What motherboard do you have? and what was your old video card?

I had a problem similar to this when I was using slackware 9... I needed to flash my bios and everything then worked fine. maybe you should give that a try..

at that time I was using an epox 8RDA+ with an nvidia geforce 4 mx 440..

slinky - post the contents of your existing xorg.conf file. Secondly, although I agree it can be frustrating to post a question and not get a lot of responses, please keep in mind that everyone here is a volunteer, helping others out in their spare time. People post responses if/when they have advice they think may be helpful, and although the goal of the site is to have the maximum number of questions answered, unfortunately there are some that go unanswered. Feel free to bump your own post after 24 hours if you have not received a response. -- J.W.

it works fine with windows xp and in the bios, even with the generic nv driver that comes with slackware 10, but when i try to use x with the latest drivers from nvidia, it screws up. i have an ecs mobo, pentium 4 2.4 ghz processor, 512 mb of ram, and the card is a nvidia fx 5600 agp card with 256 mb of ram. thanx for the help

edit:
in response to j.w's comment, if i have to bump it too much, then it looks like i'm getting alot of responses and people ignore the post
:sigh:
bump

bump

yeah.. it was the same way for me.. with Windows the card worked fine, but when I tried to use it in linux it would toast the xfree86.conf file.

when I flashed the bios everything worked fine. Check to make sure you have the latest bios and if not maybe try flashing it.

you mean just my regular bios or some kind of video bios? this mobo is pretty new, it came with 2003 phoenix bios on it... did it still work in windows after you flashed the bios?

bump

On my old HP laptop I would see a 1/2 sized centered screen even during the installation. I downloaded a new computer bios from the HP web site and that fixed the problem which was caused by a bug in the original one. So this is a possibility.

Mode lines pertain to both the video card ( can't exceed the dac speed of the card ), but mostly with the monitor. If the same mode lines worked with the generic nv driver, then I would guess that they would be OK.

Also, you could try an older version of the nvidia driver incase there is a bug there. Try the one before the 6111 driver and see if that works better.

thanx alot, i'll try the older versions of the driver and go looking for some new ecs bios. is it possible that it's a kernel problem? i was planning on updating to the newest kernel, but i hit a wall with the gfx card drivers and figured i'd better straighten that out first. thanx alot for the help again, you can bet i'll be back here if i have any more problems with this or anything(like i frequently do)

There is a message when compiling the NVidia driver that it isn't compatible with the rivafb double-buffer kernel module. Are you using that?