Hi all

I am having problems finding the right linux distro for me and my hardware, (nvidia GTS450), I have found 2 that work with my card, but kdenlive wont work with either,

1 fedora (wont render without crashing after latest update and fedora irc help channel no help) (kdenlive irc no help either)
2 linuxmint lmde (cant get kdenlive to recognise codecs after they have been installed)

I have tried every distro you can think of during the past 2 months to solve my problem. but apart from the above 2 distros the rest suffer from screen tearing

has anyone any ideas, before I pull what is left of my hair out?

couldnt find the right forum section so please move if needed

stripe

Short answer: Changing distros won't help. for a distro picked at random, there is always the possibility that you might have to install a driver.

When I had machines with NVidia, I always had good luck with the official NVidia drivers----however, the most recent experience is maybe 2 years ago

According to this page your card belong to the NVC0 family with the code name NVC3 (GF106).

If you want to use the "nouveau" open source driver take in account this warning, quoted from the same page:
This means that you should use a fairly recent distribution or upgrade the kernel and possibly some parts of the X stack, including probably libdrm and xf86-video-nouveau.

In the mean time there is a closed-source driver provided by nVidia which is supposed to work for your card, see that page, look in the GeForce 400 Series, driver version is 295.59 (choose the 32 bit or 64 bit fitting your ARCH).

So my best advise would be to try this one, still with a fairly recent kernel (on my Slackware-current I installed linux 3.4.x with no hassle).

If you want to try the nouveau driver I can help you a little more provided you choose to install Slackware. But for now using the driver provided by nVidia is certainly easier.

pixellany: thanks for the reply, I have been randomly picking distros for the last 2 months, It just dosent make sense why the two distros mentioned work with the nvidia driver, and the rest dont? could the way the distros are built affect the way the driver is used? prior to this I used the "NV" driver successfuly with older nvidia cards but this seems to have been replaced with the "nouveau" driver

cheers
stripe

Didier Spaier: thanks for the reply, this is starting to make sense now. with the card being recent (birthday present off the wife) it may well require a later kernel to work correctly. so distros with earlier kernels may have problems even when using the (295.59) nvidia driver. I wonder if I can remove the nouveau driver and use the nv driver instead (this worked with earlier nvidia cards) as I have always had trouble with the noveau driver

cheers
stripe

I wouldn't recommend to use the nv driver, it is unsupported and will get you no 2D-, 3D- and video acceleration.
I would recommend to settle with one distro and we will help you to install the proprietary driver according to your distros way to do it.

Well, you can still try a "nv" driver but as the last version was released on july 30, 2010 I am not sure it will recognize your card...

Meanwhile the safe way is to use the "vesa" driver instead.

To do that on Slackare 13.37 I would simply type this in a terminal as root:
then blacklist other drivers in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, appending a few lines to this file:
then (re) start X.

Adapt as needed to another distribution.

PS Of course do not expect to play 3D games with that

Thanks lads but I have just broken a fresh install when trying to update a driver,

stripe