I have a problem running a dual monitor setup with an Nvidia card. I’m running OpenSuse 12.3, x86_64 using the nouveau video driver. Untill a few days ago everything was fine, but then my system irreparably crashed and I reinstalled it and now am having this problem. What happens is at some point the mouse pointer disappears on one of the screens (either one is affected). It can only reappear after a reboot. Usually it takes about 5 minutes of relatively active work, but I can trigger it within several seconds if I move the mouse across the edge between the monitors really fast. The mouse actually continues to work, but the pointer is not shown… I have tried upgrading/downgrading kernel version, changed all kinds of Display options, but no luck so far. I also failed to install the official Nvidia drivers (that’s a whole other topic, but for now using those is not an option, even though I’d prefer the official driver). Googling has not helped so far either…
Here are some config details:
Opensuse 12.3, 64 bit
KDE 4.10.3
kernel 3.7.10-1.1-desktop
> lspci | grep VGA:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF104 [GeForce GTX 460] (rev a1)
One monitor is 1920x1080 and the other 1680x1050.
Any help will be appreciated.
Yes, I have a similar problem. It appears to be a nouveau bug. In my case, it is a Gforce 6150 LE card.
Your problem seems worse than mine. For me it only happens when the display switches off. So I can set the KDE power settings to never switch off the display, and I am fine. I also see this happen if running “icewm” so it is not only KDE that triggers the problem.
I switched to the nvidia driver, and that fixed my problem.
Your best bet will be to go with the nvidia driver for your card. You might have to install it the hard way if you are having problems installing from the repos. The “hard way” is not all that hard.
Thanks for the info. I’ve installed the nvidia driver “the hard way” and it seems to be working fine. I don’t know why I was hesitating to do that earlier
I had this problem only this was due to me trying to go back to nouveau as the nvidia driver, (the hard way) would no longer work on kernel 3.10.x even with the latest driver, 319.32 at time of writing. Not only did nouveau eat my mouse pointer, (only one head of my twin monitor setup was working at that point) but it stopped the NIC from autoconfiguring too.
You can get your NIC back up with:
ifconfig eth0 up
service network restart
You can find a patch for the nvidia driver on this page:
You apply it to the nvidia .run file thus:
bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-319.23.run --apply-patch <path to patch>/nvidia-3.10.patch
this will generate a custom .run file, which you install the hard way as per usual, booting your kernel with modeset.nouveau=0 and then rmmod nouveau, and change your driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d./20-nouveau.conf from nouveau to nvidia.
You can get your second head up with nvidia-settings, then selecting the X Server Display Configuration then select the screen that’s off, and set the “postion” manually from the drop down menu, (left of, right of, etc) and hit apply. It should bring your second head up at that point.
Took me a morning of groping with opera using only a keyboard to work that out. The rest of my browsers opened, and snapped into place on the second (non functional) monitor So I thought I’d share.
OPEN Suse 12.3 HP corporate SFF base, and Quadro NVS 290 GFX card.
That’s not necessary. X uses the nvidia driver if it can be loaded (i.e. it is installed and the nouveau kernel module is not loaded).
And nvidia-settings generates an xorg.conf which overrides the settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ anyway.
The only necessary thing to do is either add “nomodeset”/“modeset.nouveau=0” to the kernel boot options, or (the preferred way) create a file “/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf” with the content “blacklist nouveau” (AFAIK the nvidia driver installer should do that automatically if it detects the nouveau driver running).