This is why most people just use nVidia's proprietary drivers, which are quite good. They are the only nVidia drivers (ignoring nouveau+Gallium, which is currently unstable) that support 3D acceleration. See here. I would urge anyone with an nVidia card to use the proprietary drivers unless they are exceptionally strong advocates for open source (ie they value freedom over functionality).

Regarding X without xorg.conf, I heard on one of the Linux podcasts that I listen to that the current version of X is capable of probing hardware on starting X and therefore does not require an xorg.conf, though one may be configured if necessary. This page at x.org seems to support that.

I find that the terminal font's changing from what it was before running X to something different after running X to be very strange, but I also know that computers can do strange things. That's why we need places like LQ.

I think that the boot font is set in /etc/lilo.conf. Mine is set for vga = normal.

This is getting beyond my realm of knowledge: I have run ncurses programs (pkgtool) under X, but only in a terminal window, and never noticed anything funky.

Good luck. I wish I could help more. I will certainly monitor this thread--I might learn something.

T3slider,
Good advice. Downloading and installing the Nvidia driver was painless and quick. Nvidia has a nifty install routine that I wish more would adopt. The interesting thing is that the driver makes my screen brighter; however, my background which used to fade from green to black from left to right is no longer a gradual fade but a series of bars starting at green stepping in about 1" wide bars to the last bar which is black.

Another interesting thing is that I have now have an xorg.conf file and X seems to be happily using it, whereas I was running without one before.

I have two projects now: 1) analyse that xorg.conf to find out what it does differently, besides the Nvidia driver, from my previous files 2) get down and try Compiz for 3d.

I for one would like to know what you find when you analyze your xorg.conf. I have something I need to resolve (it's not urgent, because I have workaround that takes three mouse clicks) but I need to soak up more about xorg.conf than the little I already know.

frankbell,
Well, the analysis is not so complicated. The xorg.conf created by nvidia differs from the one created by xorgconfig in that
1) it has no modules section
2) it invokes "nvidia" rather than nv
3) instead of giving font paths in the /usr/share/fonts directory, it puts them in the /usr/lib64/x11/fonts directory

That's it! We know the nv invokes the non-nvidia supplied driver. I guess that a 64 bit application needs 64 bit fonts and the xorgconfig program does not know to seek them out. It is my guess that one of these causes X to fail. No error message in the log is clear on this.

The lack of a modules section in the nvidia generated xorg.conf confuses me. But, it is probably one reason why compiz does not work with this file - compiz requires, at least, that glx be loaded. So, I will get around to testing this as well.

Mpagnan,

You may be onto something, but bear this in mind: I get the garbled text every now and again on both of my computers running Slackware 13.1.

My desktop computer is an AMD Athlon 7750 Dual-Core Processor running Slackware64_13.1 (multi-lib) with the Nvidia driver and the attendant xorg.conf.

My laptop is an older IBM Thinkpad A22m, Pentium III with the on-board ATI Rage video card. Naturally, that one is running 32-bit Slackware 13.1, with no xorg.conf.

I can't reliably make the garbled text appear, but it does seem to happen more often when I run an Ncurses-based application in a terminal window in X.

Regards,

Lufbery,
My athlon is the same as yours.

I copied the modules section from the xorg.conf generated by xorgconfig to that generated by nvidia, which I have been using. It makes no difference - and compiz still does not work. This narrows the problem down to one thing - xorgconfig still sets up xorg.conf to look for fonts in the 32 bit font directory. Running with no xorg.conf may do the same thing. Try changing your xorg.conf to point to the 64 bit font directory. Let me know what happens.