OpenSUSE 11.1 problems on Inspiron 1520

English Hardware
1

I just installed OpenSUSE 11.1 on a Dell Inpiron 1520 laptop. It comes with a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS.
I can’t find a way to make the driver work.
First I installed the development tools (kernel source, gcc, make, etc) and then I installed the driver from the repositories. After running sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia I get this error logged in /var/log/Xorg.99.log

(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
(II) UnloadModule: “nvidia”
(II) UnloadModule: “wfb”
(II) UnloadModule: “fb”
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

So I decide to download the NVDIA driver.
What I did first was (to get version.h):

cd /usr/src/linux
make oldconfig
make prepare

And then run the driver, but I get the fallowing error:

“unable to determine the version of the kernel sources”

I just don’t know what else I can do/try/fix.

2

Hi,

Don’t panic. The easiest way to install NVIDIA drivers in Openuse is to use YAST.

This link will show you how to do it.

Opensuse is by the easier distro to install Drivers on. If you want help install the wireless 1390 drivers give me a shout.

3

I made the video card work. Here is what i did:

Reinstalled OpenSUSE and updated it.
From YaST I installed:
Base Development
kernel-source
kernel-syms

After that I downloaded the nvidia driver and installed it manually and it worked!

4

Glad to read you managed to get it running.

To give myself a toy to play with, I ordered a nVidia GeForce 8400 GS for an old (very old) desktop PC. I’m hoping it will arrive in a week or two.

The GeForce 8400 GS (and 8400M GS) support Pure Video for MS-Windows (and hence support VDPAU for Linux), where VDPAU is still very much state of the art in Linux, … and there is a reasonably likelyhood much later this year that we will see mainstream Linux VDPAU support in mplayer, vlc, xine, mythtv, and other applications, providing the capability for smoothly playing back High Definition Video by offloading the decoding to the 8400 GS GPU.

Currently ffmpeg provides VDPAU, but none of the multimedia players (as packaged by anyone for openSUSE) can take advantage of this. I do know of Linux users who have successfully done an mplayer custom compile, to use the VDAPU offloading to the GPU of video decoding (h.264, mpeg-1/2, vc-1).

5

i have a 8400mgs in my vostro too lol

6

A correction to this. The latest mplayer packaged by packman packagers (released a couple of days ago) now supports vdpau and hence High Definition Video playback/decoding, and if you have difficulty playing back high definition video, you need to give mplayer a try. You will need to be using the proprietary nVidia graphic card drivers for this to work.