what nvidia driver options: nv6600

Simon Bridge · 04-12-2006, 11:34 PM

Just installed ASUS NV 6600 board into my system running FC4 with kver 2.6.16 (FC4 distro kernel). Everything is updated via yum and everything seems to go fine and dandy. Nvidia's installer processed things fine - however, I see there are a range of video options.

My only experience with nvidia is when things have gone wrong for other people. This helped me install the card and the drivers well enough. What I am interested in is:

What options do people use/suggest?

Here's what I have:

Code:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600/GeForce 6600 GT] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.: Unknown device 81b1
        Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 18
        Memory at e4000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        Memory at e5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at e6000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [44] AGP version 3.0

... and here's the xorg.conf:

Code:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "Videocard vendor"
    BoardName      "NVIDIA GeForce 6600"
EndSection

... as you see, totally minimal. I've figured I'd want to get rid of the splash screen ... what else?

PTrenholme · 04-14-2006, 08:40 AM

Not a reply to you question, but did you read the sticky at the top of the Fedora sub-forum before you installed the nVidia drivers using nVidia's installer?

Re your question, try using the nvidia-settings command to make changes and see what happens.

Simon Bridge · 04-15-2006, 04:00 AM

Woo-hoo... no I did not. Thanks for the heads up.

Basically everything seems to be going fine. Basically the trouble is:

Quote:

Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities
replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with their own libGL.
Nvidia's driver installs a replacement libglx.a X server module,
removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in the process.

Meaning that redhat's DRI won't go ... I note that I have DRI with this card as is. The problem crops up when I change to a different card and/or try to use native fedora drivers.

Interestingly, nvidia don't tell us that installing their driver also installs their libGL. Or, are we supposed to realise that this is required?

So far I've had a couple of unexpected crashes (usually from the screensaver - and that seems to have been due to the settings there for the old drivers) and the CPU running hot (which no longer happens).

I used the nvidia installer because I didn't see the proprietary driver in the yum repos. But then, I'd disabled livna because yum was reporting conflicts involving that repo. Now I enable livna I see the driver I needed.

I'd actually prefer to install the driver via yum, since then it will update with each new distro kernel. From the looks of things... I should be able to uninstall the driver (which swaps the old libGL and libGLX back) and then update everything, and then yum install nvidia... since the "old" libs are in fact quite new still.

kevkim55 · 04-15-2006, 04:24 AM

NVidia's README file does state that the driver installs its own libGL.so.*. If you've got NVidia card, then NVidia drivers with their libGL would be the best thing to do. Some of the screensavers that rely on Mesa's libGL do not run or do not run properly using NVidia's libGL. Ofcourse, the question would be - what do you need the most screensavers or .....?

I personally use NVidia's drivers and don't need the screensavers based on Mesa lib.

As far as tweaking the graphics environment, read thru' the README file which usually gets installed to /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA..... This README lists out several tweaks, options and work arounds for some of the NVidia chips. Alternately, you can use nvidia-settings though, it doesn't provide you with all the tweaks/options.