Fresh install on my 3rd openSuse PC. I have an nVidia Geforce 210 card. Install went thro but with no hardware acceleration for X.
I installed the nvidia driver 260 from the ftp repo and that broke X. X errored out during boot “Display lasted 0.004456” error. I booted into failsafe and removed the nvidia driver but X would still not boot. I then went and installed the 256 driver from the nvidia website. Still no go. But once I installed that, X will not automatically start, I get to a console prompt now instead.
I have to manually start X with “gdm start” as su to get back into X for the time being. Booting results in the gdm service being “unused” as per my boot message.
Starting service gdm unused
...
Failed services in runlevel 5 rng-tools
Skipped services in runlevel 5 earlyxdm cifs nfs xdm
I uninstalled the nvidia drivers with nvidia-installer --uninstall. My Xorg.0.log file states it is still looking for the nvidia module even tho in 50-devices I have added device nouveau. How can I stop the nvidia module from being looked for?
You did not indicate which version of openSUSE you are trying to install. Since the first try did not work, perhaps you might try openSUSE 11.4 RC2 and its newer kernel 2.6.37. Finally, I did have an nVIDIA 240 video card and it did not play well with openSUSE 11.3. I had trouble with the monitor support and could only get a VGA connection to work on installation. I never even heard of such a thing where a DVI connection would not work. Once I got the default openSUSE 11.3 kernel version 2.6.34 updated to 2.6.36 and the video driver loaded with 260.19.21 (which was out at the time), I was finally able to use a DVI connection. Also the built-in audio was stereo only and never did support 5.1, even in Windows. While I am not sure who is at fault, the nVIDIA 200 series GPU’s were not very good to me and perhaps to to you either. Lately I have had great luck with the 450 and 460 series nVIDIA GPU’s.
thanks for the info jd, Ill try to update the kernel but the fact remains there is no nvidia proprietary driver present on my system and X will not autostart anymore and I haven’t the faintest idea what file to go into to get it to stop looking for the nvidia module and to get X to start at boot. I;d rather have a non-3d system autostart then none at all, this PC will not be for me.
thanks for the info jd, Ill try to update the kernel but the fact remains there is no nvidia proprietary driver present on my system and X will not autostart anymore and I haven’t the faintest idea what file to go into to get it to stop looking for the nvidia module and to get X to start at boot. I;d rather have a non-3d system autostart then none at all, this PC will not be for me.
Since this install did not work AND I have seen that openSUSE 11.4 works much better with nVIDIA GPU’s, I would go for it and abandon the old install that did not work.
My particular NVDIA card (GeForce 8500 GT–admittedly outdated a bit) works perfectly on openSUSE 11.2… so I went back to that version for now. With openSUSE 11.3 I wasn’t able to use dual monitors, even with the nvidia drivers installed.
I haven’t tried openSUSE 11.4 yet, but I might try & get a new more compatible video card first anyway…
>
> I had similar issues with my Nvidia card.
>
> My particular NVDIA card (GeForce 8500 GT–admittedly outdated a bit)
> works perfectly on openSUSE 11.2… so I went back to that version for
> now. With openSUSE 11.3 I wasn’t able to use dual monitors, even with
> the nvidia drivers installed.
>
> I haven’t tried openSUSE 11.4 yet, but I might try & get a new more
> compatible video card first anyway…
>
i’ve seen two comments in the bugtracker for this plasma-crash with new
nvidia drivers that seem to indicate that the latest version, 270.29,
actually does solve this long-standing bug for 32bit users:
Ohh sorry forgot to mention this is 11.3 with the desktop kernel. I would reinstall but, I wanted to get to know linux a bit more and figure out exactly why X decided to no longer start at boot. I have read so far that X uses in this order: xorg.conf file (I do not use one) then it uses the xorg.d directory of seperate files, then auto configure. I say “this order” because the xorg.conf overwrites any other calls. What I want to know is how to get the autoconfigure to not use nvidia as a module. I have tried to edit 50-devices.conf and that didn’t seem to work at all, I think this might be the key.
Again my X log files states no “nvidia” module exists and I have no idea where to type “nouveau” so the system no longer looks to the nvidia module.
This is exactly what I did and upon reboot of the PC my screen flickers and then states “Display Lasted 0.0000XXX seconds” about 6 times then I am at a console prompt to logon.
>
> My biggest concern right now, is to get X to start again when the PC
> boots. I never once edited any files that would stop X from running.
By trial and error, I’ve managed to get several differnt machines to run.
One thing that helps is that the 270.xx Nvidia betas all seem to be aware of
the nouveau issues and have (so far) taken care of the conflicts. One thing
I did run into is that if there is an existing xorg.conf file and you do an
update installation that file is gonna cause you grief. I finally hit on a
method that works for me on both an update
delete any existing xorg.conf files.
do the installation. It will likely hang when it tries to restart with
the new system if you did either a new install or an update and I’ve had to
power off to recover since the keyboard is dead.
boot to a failsafe session. Without the xorg.conf, that seems to work
reliably here.
download the driver from Nvidia. Yast fails to install the RPM from the
repo with a dependency error - seen that reported here from others as well.
boot to run level 3 and run the .run file you downloaded. I don’t know
about 260.xx versions but the 270.xx versions have pretty well taken care of
the necessary steps need to get rid of the nouveau problems. You can
probably boot either to a failsafe or regular desktop then but don’t expect
much as to the screen resolution - it seems to be stuck at the installation
resolution. Run: kdesu nvidia-settings. You’ll need root permissions as
11.4 changes the permissions on some of the xorg files that used to be
available. That will write an xorg.conf and let you set things the way your
want.
One other thing that helped here was someone’s suggestion to specify
irqpolling as a boot option when you start the installation boot from DVD -
I’ve got at least two machines with screwy BIOS setups which result in the
initial hardware scan unable to read the monitor settings without that boot
parameter.
All-in-all, Nvidia video has been the biggest hangup with 11.4 here. 11.2
and 11.3 had problems as well but nothing like 11.4.
OK just to be pedantic, the NVIDIA drive is used in place of the nouveau driver. Also rather then to blow away the xorg.conf move it to a backup name in case there are mouse setting or other things in there that may be useful. Also the nvidia-settings can be run (as root) to create or modify an existing xorg.conf file.
>
> OK just to be pedantic, the NVIDIA drive is used in place of the nouveau
> driver. Also rather then to blow away the xorg.conf move it to a backup
> name in case there are mouse setting or other things in there that may
> be useful. Also the nvidia-settings can be run (as root) to create or
> modify an existing xorg.conf file.
Late night - didn’t sink in that he already had the Nvidia drivers
installed, then went totally fuzzy suggesting kdesu rather than just sudo
for nvidia-settings. MORE COFFEE!!