Xorg flickers and dies after nVidia driver install attempt
 

Hey there,

I've been working on a Gentoo install for my friend in Canada over the weekend, and I've almost got everything set up properly. I'm having a bit of trouble with Xorg 6.8.2, you see.

Initially, I had xorg (plus whatever dependencies emerge took care of), xdm, gnome, kde, and fluxbox installed and working wonderfully. Everything was perfectly fine. Then he wanted the closed-source nVidia drivers for gaming purposes.

So, he tried to do the installation of them himself. He removed rivabf support from the kernel, because the nvidia driver installer complained about it. This has since been recompiled as a kernel module.

Half-way through the install done with the nVidia installer (from their website), he decided that he would use the ebuild gentoo provided instead. So emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia glx (the latest and greatest ones in ~amd64) was run. The xorg config file was edited accordingly, and X was started.

However, my friend reports that X started. showed the nVidia logo, and promptly died. He had been starting it with /etc/init.d/xdm. He tried a few times with other commands - startx, startkde, bla bla bla, only to have the same thing occur. On a closer examination, I noted that the X processes were running.

I checked his log files for both xdm and Xorg. There were no errors, and it seems as if they started cleanly and should be running. And according to ps, they /were/ running, but the screen was black.

Thinking this was the nVidia driver's screwing something up, nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel were unemerged. The xorg config was changed back, and X was restarted.

But, for the sake of god, it didn't fix the problem. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, but X just flashed on his screen for a second and then went black. (Not to a console, just black.)

Xorg was recompiled, and the config was regenerated. The problem was still presemt. I fiddled with the driver for the card. What it had been on when it was working, nv, caused the screen-black problem. Vesa, which I'm told sometimes works with GeForce FX 5200 cards, caused the monitor to turn off. And vga suffered from the same problem as nv.

So, I have don't really know what's wrong with X. I'm guessing one of the things it depends on became damaged during the attempted nVidia install, but I don't really know.

Any pointers would be GREATLY appreciated, as I've been struggling with this for a few days now.

And here are the relevant logs/configs.
Clicky.

Thanks to anyone who tries to help.

You might try using nvidia-<version>.sh --uninstall
That should remove any garbage left over from the partial i nstall that is mucking up the works. Also, if that doesn't work, it might be worth attempting to startx with the generic "nv" driver to see if it is a problem w/ nvidia or xorg itself.

Ah, an excellent idea. I never thought of uninstalling anything the nvidia script installed.

However, this didn't help. X starts, flashes, and goes black. And it is using the standard nv driver.

But thanks, anyways. Any other ideas?

I'm just kind of throwing ideas out there, if this is Gentoo, you could try a "revdep-rebuild" that might pick up whatever is broken in xorg. I have a friend who lives in my dorm that had a whole mess of trouble getting XFree86 to work on his computer. The problem was actually his XF86Config file. It was a valid file, but it was outputting HorizSync and VertRefresh rates that were outside what his monitor could handle. If xorg crashes no matter what drive you are using, try cd'ing into /usr/bin/X11/, backing up the current xorg.config and running ./xorgconfigure and choose conservative settings.

That didn't turn up anything good. It spat out a load of stuff on point2play needing libgl or something, but cedega/winex really has no impact on how Xorg works.

It didn't rebuild anything, and X is still broken. =/

I looked back through your xorg.conf file and noticed

I beleive that as a driver "vesa" might work, I was able to use it on my GeForce4, I don't know much about your specific chipset.

What exactly are you planning on using rivafb for, as far as I know, it conflicts with all incarnations of the nvidia driver.

I don't know if it might be worth trying to recompile Xorg with very conservative CFLAGS other than that all I can say is Good Luck, beyond this I don't know enough to make any other suggestions.

Er, yea, the vga thing is only in there because it was my last, desperate 'omgplzwork' attempt at getting X to display something on the monitor, aside from blackness.

I put rivabf support back in because X stopped working around the same time that was removed, so perhaps that had some effect on it. I guess that this was not the case.

The card is an MSI GeForce FX 5200 w/ 256mb of onboard memory.

I've also don't think that the USE flags have caused any problems for xorg, because it was working before with the same set of flags.

CFLAGS are different from USE flags. USE flags generally don't cause things to compile badly, but occassionally it is possible to pass CFLAGS that cause things to get really buggy. It might be useful for you to post the /etc/make.conf. Also, speaking of rivafb, its one type of frame buffer. I have the geforce4 and this is the arguments that I passed to my kernel on boot (I use the vesafb-tng framebuffer (its about 5 lines up in the config menu)).
kernel /kernel-nitro-2.6.11-r4 root=/dev/hda6 video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr,1028x768-16@60, if you have frame buffer support you may have to append either a vga= or video= statement into your bootloader configuration. I had problems with that when I first installed gentoo.

p.s. I wish I had that much onboard memory :rolleyes:

did you run xorgconfig? you may have soem bad refresh rate settings that yoru monitor can't handle.

Does gentoo use /etc/modules.conf? If it does, what is in that file?

You also should look at /etc/modules if that is used.

You are into distro dependencies here, but on my distro (Mandrake 10) you need to have the line in modules and you need to have in the modules.conf file.

The problem has been solved. Kudos to linuxwolf from efnet.

X was fine, just as the logs said. For some reason, however, xdm was broken, and startkde didn't function, so me and my friends all thought it was X itself.

Solution: Use GDM. It's prettier, anyways.

Thanks to everyone who's posted, I appreciate your time.