I have a GForce G0 6200 and tried 2 different drivers. The first one was nvidiafb, which was delivered with my kernel and the second is nvidia, which I downloaded from nvidia homepage.

If I use nvidiafb, the graphical mode (run-level 5) looks OK, but if I start only to run-level 3 (with command-line) then the text is somehow scrambled: every line starts at the right side of the monitor, the first 4 letters are repeated, the second 4 are missing, and the rest of the line continues on the left side. I can see the scrambled messages too while booting the computer (run-levels 3 and 5).

If I use nvidia driver, all is ok in run-level 3, but in graphical mode (run-level 5) my letters have red and blue shadows. Maybe this comes from an anti-aliasing function?

Does anyone know, what the reason for the problems with these two drivers can be? Can I deactivate anti-aliasing with nvidia driver?

Howdy

What distro are you running?

Cheers,
Aaron

My distribution is scientific linux, but I use a vanilla kernel 2.6.14.2, which I configured and compiled. The reason is, that the original installation used general drivers, which worked, but the machine was slow. So I try to improve it, by putting better drivers and using a better kernel configuration.

I just found, that the red and blue shadows on my text come from anti-aliasing function, that can be activated and deactivated in KDE, but somehow I didn't see these shadows with nvidiafb driver (maybe I didn't look carefully?), or the anti-aliasing is calculated in a different way with nvidia driver. Without anti-aliasing function the text looks bad, so I keep the function.

Are the drivers correctly working with full hardware accelleration?

There's a program to configure the NVIDIA driver, the package is nvidia-settings, but thats Ubuntu. Maybe u could find something similar?

Cheers

There is a bug with nvidia drivers that affect framebuffer consoles - usually get scrambled text or coloured blocks instead of text when switch to terminal after starting x, or closing down x

If this is what you have, unfortunately the only option is to disable fb consoles in kernel and set vga = normal in lilo.conf

Maybe email it as a bug report to nvidia and it might get fixed for next version.

@nevelis:

I think, that the nvidia driver is working with acceleration. Here a part of Xorg.0.log:

(II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "1024x768"
(II) Loading extension NV-GLX
(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA 3D Acceleration Architecture Initialized
(II) NVIDIA(0): Using the NVIDIA 2D acceleration architecture

I don't think, that there is a configuration program shipped with my distribution. Maybe there is one in gentoo or debian, but I haven't finished these installations.


@dive:

So I won't use nvidiafb until the bug is fixed. Thanks.

Type nvidia-settings in a terminal - it's part of nvidia driver installation

@dive:
yes, the nvidia configuration program is there. I try to get the settings better. Thanks.

The problem is solved. It works with the new nvidia driver version 1.0-8174. (I didn't change any configuration, just deinstalled the old driver and installed the new one). Maybe version 1.0-7676 was buggy.