NVIDIA driver/display problem

So before Christmas, I was fat, dumb, and happy with Leap 42.1 on this old Dell Latitude E6400 with an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M GPU. I connect the laptop to a docking station that has two 24" monitors and it’s been working great since last August. When I turned on the machine yesterday on my first day back at work, it booted up normally, but then nothing showed up on any of displays.

I was able to <ctl>-<alt>-<F1> to get to a text display and poke around enough to discover that I had a driver version problem. The NVIDIA driver installed was more recent than the kernel module, and because of the mismatch, the driver wasn’t loading. I tried reinstalling the driver from NVIDIA’s repo using YaST, but no joy. Looking around these forums, I noticed that Leap 42.2 was available, so instead of messing around trying to get this working on 42.1, which I assume won’t be getting the same amount of attention as 42.2, I upgraded to 42.2 and installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver. It still didn’t work, so I uninstalled the NVIDIA driver and fell back to the non-proprietary drivers supported by opensuse. This works OK when the laptop isn’t connected to the docking station, but I get no display at all when I either connect it to the docking station or plugin an external monitor directly into the laptop.

I use this laptop for development, so I really need two monitors. I either need to figure out how to get the external monitors working with the open source drivers, or how to get them working with the proprietary NVIDIA driver working (preferred solution). I’m still not even sure which driver generation I should be using with this GPU; my google-foo failed me here. I previously was using G03 since it was the only one that worked. Can someone verify that this is the correct driver? What else can I do to get this working?

Confirming that G03 is the way to go. Currently available for 42.2 is http://http.download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/42.2/x86_64/x11-video-nvidiaG03-340.101-5.1.x86_64.rpm
This is only partial info, I know, but I never had a Quadro and they are tricky at times… Good Luck

Thanks, good to know. I’ve already tried that RPM and just get a blank screen with it installed. I can’t even switch to a working terminal session, though I can log in remotely to do additional troubleshooting.

Are you really sure that you already tried THAT version? It is timestamped 04-Jan-2017 19:19 so just out of the press…
Maybe you had a problem with the Dec 21st issue?

I’m positive. I tried that version at least 10 times yesterday and tried again just now. dmesg shows:

    3.936726] [Firmware Bug]: Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1"if the current driver doesn't work.

I tried doing as suggested by inserting:

options video allow_duplicates=1

in /etc/modprobe.d/50-nvidia.conf and also in /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-default.conf, but nothing changed and the same error is reported. The Xorg log just states that the nvidia kernel module couldn’t load.

Hmmmmm, I wonder why … :wink:

Got the NVIDIA driver working by installing it the hard way.

Nice to read that, although we didn’t learn why it failed in the first place…