Okay all, I’m both new to openSUSE and to KDE, so I have some quick questions about graphics drivers.
I’ve ran the KDE Live ISO on my PC and found that it all seems to work rather well. Now I use an Nvidia Geforce GTS 250, so I want to make sure the openSUSE 13.1 KDE installation I’m about to do uses the best/most optimized graphics driver for my card. Should I just follow this method shown here for this http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers ? Or is there a way to do it in YasT or some Driver Manager app in KDE?
Or is there a way to do it in YasT or some Driver Manager app in KDE?
Well, that page does explain how to do it with YaST.
How I would do it: (slightly varying from the “repository way”)
Enter YaST->Software Repositories, click on “Add”, choose “Community Repositories”, and activate the “nVidia Repository” in the list
Then enter YaST->Software Management, search for “nvidia”, and install the following packages (some of them may be selected automatically, but better verify them):
nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop (this depends on the actual kernel you are using, kernel-desktop is the most likely but you can check with “uname -a”), nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop (this has to match with your kernel as well), x11-video-nvidiaG03, nvidia-glG03, nvidia-computeG03.
(the 1-click install/autoselection of packages can be wrong under certain circumstances)
Then reboot, and the nvidia driver should be used. Run KInfocenter f.e. to check.
Please note that it can happen that the driver does not work at the first boot after installation. In that case, just reboot and it should work then.
Here you should give a bit more details, e.g. if you’re booting in UEFI or the old style (or legacy) mode.
Good if you can wipe your hard disk - which in many cases isn’t the usual situation.
The versions of the kernel change sometimes when updates are being made.
This can and most likely will cause a failure of the graphics drivers installed for a previous kernel version,
which is a problem frequently dealt with in this forum.
For me this sounds like the “non-existant floppy drive” issue…
Do you have a floppy drive?
If not, try to disable it in the BIOS settings, or add “brokenmodules=floppy” to the kernel boot options when booting from the installation medium.
Some BIOSes tell the kernel that there is a floppy drive although there is none, and the installer then tries to access it which causes hangs.
It should continue after a while (timeout), but this can take hours…
The versions of the kernel change sometimes when updates are being made.
Of course the kernel version changes when updates are being made, that’s the purpose of updates, no?
But this should not matter if you install the nvidia driver via the packages from the repo.
And the kernel flavor does not change when installing updates.
This can and most likely will cause a failure of the graphics drivers installed for a previous kernel version,
which is a problem frequently dealt with in this forum.
No.
The problems most frequently dealt here in this forum are that people get the wrong kernel modules installed in the first place, or both G02 and G03 driver versions which can work for a while but cause problems after an update.
And of course that people install the driver “the hard way” (by downloading the .run package from nvidia’s home page) and then wonder why it suddenly doesn’t work any more after some updates. In this case you do have to reinstall the driver after each kernel update, and also after certain other updates like xorg-x11-server and Mesa-libGL1 in particular.
Hey all, yea I had given up for the night, so I’ll be restarting it tomorrow when I get back to work.
I do not have a floppy installed, and it should already be disabled in the BIOS, but I’ll be sure to double-check. Also, I do have the ability to format the HDD as I have multiple PCs available at the office (some Linux, most Windows). All update this tomorrow, thanks!
The problem is there is a bug in the kernel that if no floppy drive is present and the BIOS reports one will hang the install for many many minuets. It is said that it will eventually time out but that is not confirmed to my knowledge
Well, people reported that it will continue after a while (after hours maybe). But might depend on the system as well.
I cannot tell anything out of experience, as none of my systems have that problem (well, most have floppy drives anyway… ).
AFAIK this is reproducable in VMware (at least its BIOS tells there is a floppy drive even though you didn’t add one in the config, but only a floppy controller), so I might try to reproduce it there some time. (VirtualBox’s BIOS doesn’t have that problem either)
But anyway, this bug should be fixed since January (by openSUSE’s kernel developers), the fix is part of 13.1’s kernel 3.11.10 (and all supported upstream versions), but of course the kernel on the installation medium (3.11.6) still has the bug.
