I have Feisty x86-64 installed on an Athlon-64x2 system with twin nVidia 7600 GT video cards (SLi). This was done via dist-upgrades from Dapper LTS -> Edgy -> Feisty.

The stock 2.6.20-16-generic kernel boots fine; no problems; the framebuffer seems to work - the boot parameter "vga=794" works, no sweat (though I can't get a CLI console login prompt by hitting ctrl-alt-Fx - just a blinking cursor) - I need to figure out what's up here).

However, there are a few little tweaks I want to make, so I installed the kernel source package, changed the few options I needed, then recompiled.

On reboot, I get no framebuffer console text unless I remove the "vga=xxx" line in the bootloader (after which, I only get the huge 80x25 characters).

I went back in and changed .config, compiling the nVidia framebuffer support into the kernel, rather than as a module. No better.

Interestingly, I had a similar problem on another system running Mandrake, when I tried to compile a vanilla 2.6.20 kernel...that box has an nVidia video card also.

So it appears that there is a certain setting that has to be tweaked just right to have the framebuffer work with nVidia cards...???

I have seen some references to this via Google, but haven't found a fix yet. Anyone else on this forum seen this? If so, could you give me a clue as to what I need to set to get this fixed?

Also, I want to use the nVidia binaries, rather than the stock "nv" driver. I have installed the Ubuntu-specific packages (through Synaptic), but changing the driver name to "nvidia" in xorg.conf doesn't work. Since I can't get a CLI console, I can't kill X to try and install the binaries from the nVidia web site.

Any help would be appreciated - thanks.

this may or may not help. after a stock generic install, gedit/kedit to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and edit it to reflect your equipment and os setup. make sure the card is set to "nvidia", not "vesa".
download the nvidia 9755 rpm for your card. install it. (this may require a dkms modules loader install, too)
reboot.

enjoy.

hope this works. it did for me!!
love yah --O.

I was able to get the nVidia binary installed by ssh'ing in from another machine, killing X, then installing it remotely. So now all's well there.

I still need to figure out why I can't get a console with ctl-alt-F2, etc., and why I can't get the framebuffer to work.

Thanks...Bob