proprietary nvidia driver crashes slackware 13 x86_64
 

I'm having an issue where the proprietary nvidia driver seems to crash my system. the weird thing is that it only happens if i have already started an X session. here is what i mean. i don't use a display manager so i invoke X by running startx. now if i run it for the first time it starts no problem. but if i kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace and then try to run startx again it just hangs and the machine completely freezes up. this only happens with the proprietary nvidia driver. if i use the vesa driver it works fine. the open-source nvidia driver doesn't seem to support my card: GeForce GT220. i never had this problem with slackware 13 x86. i have tried using the 190.42 version from slackbuilds.org as well as the latest version from nvidia's site 190.53. aside from this problem it seems to work fine otherwise.

any thoughts?

no problems with it here

may i ask what version of nvidia driver you are using kodon?

All is well for me too, but I haven't got CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE configured. Otherwise though, the current nvidia driver works great. I just installed the brand new 190.53 version today; before this I was using 190.42; before this, I believe I have used every version they've released over the last couple years, and have never had any problems worth noting.

@ fancylad -- have you looked in your Xorg. log file, and in maybe /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog to see if there are any hints there as to what's going wrong? Also, what DE are you using? KDE? If so, that **might** be a small part of the problem. If it's KDE you use, is it the Slack13 stock version?

fancylad,

I'm running proprietary Nvidia drivers (190.53 - 32 and 64 bit versions) on all my installations (Slack64, Debian64, CentOS32, Arch64, PCLOS32, Sidux64, and Zenwalk32) without any issues. I have an older GeForce 8500 w/ 1Gig onboard memory.

My suggestion to you would be a fresh download of the driver installation script and a rerun of it.

Luck!

i'm using gnome. i installed this through gnomeslackbuilds but the same problem occurs if i use xfce. i tried looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/messages but nothing shows up. i think the system crashes before it can actually log anything. do you get a full screen nividia logo that flashes on the screen just before your desktop environment loads? maybe the new driver does this?
all i know is that when it works it does this:
after i type start X the screen is black with a cursor in the top left corner. after a second or two that nvidia logo flashes on the screen and gnome loads.

when it doesn't work it does this:
after i type startx the screen is black with a cursor in the top left corner but nothing happens after this.

i have tried running nvidia-uninstall and reinstalling it several times already.

Hmm.

I'm not familiar with the Gnome Slackbuilds that might be around these days. A couple years ago, I tried Dropline Gnome, a slackware Gnome implementation, and it screwed so many things up that it turned me off thinking about that again. It messed up X11 and other things.. NOTE: I'm not trying to slight Gnome or Dropline -- for all I know the Slack Gnome builds are great today -- that's just my experience. But, maybe other users of this Gnome thing you're using can comment on their experience with it?

As for the startup logo -- all nvidia drivers have always had that built in. You can turn it on or off via xorg.conf. In a discussion we had in another thread a few weeks or more ago, a bunch of us sort of guessed/determined that we don't usually see the logo anymore because machines have gotten faster, and the logo simply comes on and goes away too fast to see. I haven't seen it in like a year or two, since getting a new machine for sure, but on my old machine, it used to appear for a second or so.

Your description of what happens when startx does not work, is very much like what happens when either the kernel has been changed, or the driver installation has been damaged. I've never heard of nor used "nvidia-uninstall". Where do you get that? Is it a driver-installer command-line option?

At this time, without *really* knowing what the problem might be, my suggestion would be to closely examine your kernel configuration if it is not a stock one, and/or reinstall the nvidia driver from runlevel 3 using the usual nvidia installer method.

Sasha

EDIT: P.S. - if your video device is very old or very new, it might just be a bug/glitch that hasn't yet been identified by anyone else. I'm not familiar with that GeForce 220.

nvidia-uinstall is a command line utility that comes with the nvidia proprietary drivers. the kernel is a stock one. like i mentioned earlier, i have tried uninstalling/reinstalling the driver several times. i don't use a display manager so i'm always in run-level 3. it is possible that this is related to gnomeslackbuilds. also it could be just be a bug in the driver that reacts to my card. i just bought the card a couple weeks ago and it worked fine with the 32-bit drivers. anyways it all works fine except for this one problem, although i think that anytime the machine completely freezes up it's a pretty serious problem.

Which card do you have, and have you checked your xorg.conf for errors?

We have several PCs with several different Nvidia cards ranging from a 440go to a GT220. Both 32bit and 64bit Slackware. Never a problem except needing to add ignore crt-0 for the 440go.

my card is a GeForce GT220. Nothing in my Xorg.0.log file strikes me as being a problem but i'll post it below if someone cares to verify for me :)

unless anyone has any other ideas i might just reinstall it tomorrow and try running X and xfce without installing gnome-slackbuilds. thanks to GrapefruiTgirl for suggesting that it might be this. i did notice a bit of strange behavior today where slapt-get didn't install all of the necessary gnome packages automatically and later on ldconfig was complaining about some truncated libs that were related to some evolution gnome package that i had to reinstall.

I don't really see anything peculiar in that log file you posted. Looks pretty normal.

And yes, might be a good idea to reduce this situation to as few parameters as possible: as you suggest, start with X and XFCE only, and run that for a couple days at least, and see if the trouble goes away (of course, remove that Gnome thing first, and repair those broken libs & stuff, maybe re-install Xorg again) and if a repaired X + XFCE works, maybe try the gnome thing again if you really want to see if it's borked, but personally (as I mentioned :) ) I would leave Gnome out of the equation.

Best of success, keep us posted.

Sasha

are you suggesting that i shouldn't be running gnome at all GrapefruiTgirl? i really like using gnome. i'm not sure why exactly. i think it's just because i'm used to it and it reminds me of using an old mac. i've never really cared much for kde and i don't mind xfce but i still always want to go back to gnome. i did give kde a shot however when i installed slackware13 x86 for the first time. however it seemed really buggy to me. i even upgraded to what was supposed to be a more stable version but i could never get it to work properly with compiz. it was much too "crashy" for my taste :)

I'm not suggesting either way, what you should do :) -- if you like Gnome, by all means, go for it!

All I'm saying is:

A) I wouldn't use it-- just based on personal preference and on my own experience, and..

B) Make things work without it first, on your Slackware, because Gnome it doesn't come with Slack by default for a number of good reasons, which you can read about in the various changelogs of Slack over the past few years. Gnome is, to paraphrase from here and there, "big, tangly, and hard to maintain" or something like this, so was dropped from Slackware some time ago. Therefore, since it's a very large, tangly package, it's hard to tell precisely how it will interact (or interfere) with the rest of the OS.

Basically, start with a known-good situation, and when it is proven to be good and stable, then try something like Gnome.

It's entirely up to you :)

Sasha

okay i just tried removing all the gnome-slackbuild packages with: slackpkg clean-system. then i removed the nvidia drivers with: nividia-uninstall. for some reason the nvidia uninstaller was complaining about /usr/lib64/libGL.so* files which were all symbolic links to /usr/lib64/libGL.190.43.so or something. i checked the log for this and the program runs a checksum on it and it compares it with the original. now i could see this being different if i had left over libs from using the nvidia drivers i tried from slackbuilds.org but i definitely removed those first as the nvidia installer complained about this before. so i tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers twice this morning. the second time i just rm /usr/lib64/libGL.so* before i ran nvidida-uninstall and it didn't complain that time. after i reinstalled it i ran "startx" and it loaded xfce fine but after i did a ctrl-alt-backspace and ran "startx" again it just freezed up again. after a reboot i ran "ldconfig" and got some errors about those libGL.so libs being truncated. (i'm not sure what this means exactly).

so now i'm reinstalling slackware from scratch. i'm going to leave out gnome and try installing the nvidia driver again. i'll post the results of that later.

after doing a fresh install things seem to be working fine now. i am trying kde and so far so good. as long as it is stable then i'll probably stick with it. the desktop effects are actually pretty cool :)