NVidia drivers not working, causing freezes?
 

I'm running Debian Sarge with Linux 2.6.8, KDE 3.2.3, and XFree86 4.3.0 on a system with a GeForce FX 5500. When I installed NVidia drivers (using Andrew's Debian-nVidia HOWTO), glxgears worked and appeared accelerated; however, every other OpenGL application I tried either displayed a black screen or wouldn't start at all. In addition, the entire system would freeze -- mouse movement worked, but that was it -- after just a few minutes of being turned on. What might be going on here?

Do you think there's a problem with using the proprietary drivers made by NVidia self?

Wow never read that HOWTO. Seems like a long way of doing it to me. I got my NVIDIA drivers working by simply recompiling the kernel and then installing the NVIDIA driver using the bog-standard NVIDIA installer from the NVIDIA website. Not had a single stability issue.

I've got the same set-up as you too (KDE 3.2, XFree 4.3, Kernel 2.6.8.

I had the same problem I was caused by agpgart loading the wrong drivers, check your /etc/modules (post it just in case), you should have agpgart and nvidia-agp
thats the combination that worked for me

Thanks for the help, everyone. I tried adding nvidia-agp and agpgart to /etc/modules, but that didn't seem to help.

Just in case, here's /etc/modules:

switch the order
put first agpgart and then nvidia-agp
that should do it

Thanks a lot for trying, but that doesn't seem to have worked; it still freezes. Any other ideas?

You could use the official nvidia drivers?

I've tried the official NVidia installer; doesn't seem to change anything. Thanks a lot for trying to help, though.

Now I'm wondering if it might be just be over-heating. Would the cursor still be movable in that case, though? Is there an easy way to check the temperature of my card?

how much different performance with nvidia driver?

i am using nvidia vga. but no nvidia-driver.

you're going to get much better 3d performance and video rendering/playback.

you need to make sure that the glcore and dri modules are not being loaded in "/etc/X11/XF86Config-4"

i would suggest using the nvidia installer from nvidia's site. it's much easier than that link.

A few things to try:

Right when your system boots up, run "dmesg" from a prompt and see if you see anything about NVIDIA drivers or AGP failing.

Go to /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status and see if agp is indeed enabled. There may be an error there.

Then, just out of curiousity, what is your glxgears framerate? It should be over 1000 FPS.

Lastly, you can check "glxinfo" and make sure that direct-rendering is enabled.

These are just solutiong to some of the more common problems. Thanx.

What version of nvidia driver did you installed? It seems the latest version has problems with 2.6 kernel series.
I've succesfully installed nvidia-ver-6111 on my freshly installed Debian (2.4.27). The problem I found is the driver did not compile because of a "bug" in the Debian kernel. After a simple patch on the nvidia driver it is working properly.
I've also added the line
nvidia
just after agpgart in my /etc/modules.preload.
Hope this helps
Ciao

I'm using the latest driver with a 2.6.5 kernel. Works fine. I did have to update my kernel from a previous 2.6.4 using Y.O.U.

GLX issue
 

Hi
i got 1-0-6629 nvidia drivers for 6600gt agp card.

My issue is that GLX seems to fail on X startup

I just got kernel modules nvidia, agpgart and sis-agp to work (thru 'cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status'). All libGL files seems to be inplace. But X will not load (through 'startx). It will load if i comment "glx" out of the modules section of /etc/X11/XF86config-4

So i figure there is a problem with GLX. glxinfo wont run (coz it never initialises). X crashes with 'caught signal 11' and no helpful EE messages in X log.

I had kernel 2.6.5-1-686 testing and have upgraded to 2.6.8-1-686 which fixed the agp to work.

I cred my lockups by changing from ps2 mouse and keyboard to usb - had 2 machines with different hardware and 2 different nvidia cards and different linux distros. Both had lockups with mouse and or keyboard and both were cured changing to usb. Had tried everything else mentioned previously