S.A.N.D.I. - SuSE Automated NVIDIA Driver Installer - Version 1.50

jdmcdaniel3 · December 8, 2012, 3:12am

[QUOTE=lovetoflyguy;bt614]Hi James,

First of all, thank you for sharing your scripts and expertise!

I have a few questions for you.

Does the 304.64 driver require a patch to work with SANDI and the current (oS 12.2) 3.4.x kernel?
Which is the ‘best’ or preferred method to install the Nvidia driver (with as little pain as possible!) - LNVHW or SANDI?
In the event that I completely bork the driver install and want to start from scratch again, how do I restore the default nouveau driver?

Thanks![/QUOTE]

You are very welcome and happy you are finding my bash scripts useful. Now the nVIDIA driver is up to 310.19 so I would want to know why you want to use 304.64? As for SANDI and LNVHW, they have the same install options for the nVIDIA driver, but SANDI works only if you compile your own kernels, such as can be done with my SAKC script and you have installed dkms to auto load the nVIDIA driver when you update your kernel. If this last sentence makes you ask WHAT? Then stick with LNVHW as it works with all kernel versions as long as you have installed the suggested kernel source files. You just have to reinstall the nVIDIA driver on each kernel version update. As luck would have it, you don’t get those all that often normally. Going back to using the nouveau driver can be tricky. You must do the following.

Remove the nomodeset kernel load option from your Grub2/grub menu files.
You must make sure the sysconfig value of NO_KMS_INITRD=NO
Must remove any nouveau blacklist commands.
Must uninstall the nVIDIA driver, perhaps you do this first.
Must make all changes in Runlevel 3 with no UI loaded.
Make sure console tools are loaded perhaps and make sure you can use the terminal program mc (Midnight Commander).
Might want to delete the xorg.cong file if it exists with any nvidia stuff wrote to it. This file is not required.

So I can admit to just reinstalling openSUSE before to switch to nouveau, particularly if any other issues might exist. I always do a custom partition, reuse all existing ones, I format root /, only mount /home and keep all personnel settings and must reload all applications and redo system settings. This sounds like a lot, but in just two nights I can have my system up and running just as before. I keep a copy of such files as the fstab file, make a screen capture of the partitioner so I know what I called each partition and my samba.conf file and of course, I write scripts to automate as many things as I can like setting up SAMBA. In the end, it can even be fun, but for some it sounds like torture.

What I can say is that the open source nVIDIA driver nouveau works better than I have ever seen before in kernel 3.6 and I would give it a try before I switched to the nVIDIA proprietary driver. Once I loaded the nVIDIA driver, I would likely stick with it unless something blew up and not downgrade back to the nouveau driver. Keep good backups of system files and try to never reformat your /home area and of course backup any irreplaceable files.

Thank You,

user · December 8, 2012, 6:05am

Hi James, Thanks for your response.

OK, to make a short story long… I’ve had an openSUSE (was 10.3, … 11.4) fileserver for quite a while, and I was happy enough with the Nvidia mx4000 that I originally built it with. Recently however, we decided to cancel our cable TV subscription as it cost way more than it was worth, so I decided to add the role of media server (XBMC 11.0) to my existing fileserver, which I would then hook up to our existing TV cable network (via S-video out through a RF modulator to coax). I soon confirmed my suspicion that I would need to upgrade the video card for XBMC to be usable, so I bought a cheap (~$12) GeForce 6200 AGP on Ebay, and proceeded to open the case…

Two days later, I had it back up & running with oS 12.2 and all of my samba shares restored. Unfortunately, the nouveau driver doesn’t seem able to cope with the increased video demands of the XBMC platform, so I tried to install the Nvidia driver. First I tried the ‘easy’ method (1-click) which didn’t work. I followed the subsequent directions to reinstall the driver in runlevel 3 through YaST (x11-video-nvidiaG02) but that didn’t work either.

Suffering from utter frustration, I came across your blog and decided to try it one more time. Your LNVHW script worked perfectly, and within a few minutes I was running the Nvidia 304.64 driver! To answer your question about the version I used, as near as I can tell the 304.64 is the latest version to support my GeForce 6200 AGP. Disaster struck when I connected the s-video cable, resulting in a system which can only be booted to the desktop in failsafe mode. This is my current predicament. Perhaps i made a mistake by not having the s-video cable connected to a TV when I installed the driver?

Great minds must think alike, because I have always set up my Linux rigs with / on a separate hdd, just in case something goes sideways and I need to reinstall. I also take great care to screenshot just about all of my specific config settings (network, samba, etc) before I proceed, thus minimizing headaches.

Thanks for your excellent and very clear instructions to restore the default driver - I could probably just about manage it! At this point, I’ve edited/replaced so many different config files trying to get back to nouveau, that I’m probably better off just reinstalling, which as you said will be fairly painless for me as I’m already prepared!

Sorry for being so long winded, I just wanted to explain what I’m trying to do as thoroughly as possible. My one remaining question involves the s-video output to TV; did I screw up by not having a TV connected when I ran LNVHW, or is there something else that would cause the Nvidia driver act up?

I would welcome any suggestions you may have!

Thanks!

jdmcdaniel3 · December 8, 2012, 4:08pm

[QUOTE=lovetoflyguy;bt616]Hi James, Thanks for your response.

OK, to make a short story long… I’ve had an openSUSE (was 10.3, … 11.4) fileserver for quite a while, and I was happy enough with the Nvidia mx4000 that I originally built it with. Recently however, we decided to cancel our cable TV subscription as it cost way more than it was worth, so I decided to add the role of media server (XBMC 11.0) to my existing fileserver, which I would then hook up to our existing TV cable network (via S-video out through a RF modulator to coax). I soon confirmed my suspicion that I would need to upgrade the video card for XBMC to be usable, so I bought a cheap (~$12) GeForce 6200 AGP on Ebay, and proceeded to open the case…

Two days later, I had it back up & running with oS 12.2 and all of my samba shares restored. Unfortunately, the nouveau driver doesn’t seem able to cope with the increased video demands of the XBMC platform, so I tried to install the Nvidia driver. First I tried the ‘easy’ method (1-click) which didn’t work. I followed the subsequent directions to reinstall the driver in runlevel 3 through YaST (x11-video-nvidiaG02) but that didn’t work either.

Suffering from utter frustration, I came across your blog and decided to try it one more time. Your LNVHW script worked perfectly, and within a few minutes I was running the Nvidia 304.64 driver! To answer your question about the version I used, as near as I can tell the 304.64 is the latest version to support my GeForce 6200 AGP. Disaster struck when I connected the s-video cable, resulting in a system which can only be booted to the desktop in failsafe mode. This is my current predicament. Perhaps i made a mistake by not having the s-video cable connected to a TV when I installed the driver?

Great minds must think alike, because I have always set up my Linux rigs with / on a separate hdd, just in case something goes sideways and I need to reinstall. I also take great care to screenshot just about all of my specific config settings (network, samba, etc) before I proceed, thus minimizing headaches.

Thanks for your excellent and very clear instructions to restore the default driver - I could probably just about manage it! At this point, I’ve edited/replaced so many different config files trying to get back to nouveau, that I’m probably better off just reinstalling, which as you said will be fairly painless for me as I’m already prepared!

Sorry for being so long winded, I just wanted to explain what I’m trying to do as thoroughly as possible. My one remaining question involves the s-video output to TV; did I screw up by not having a TV connected when I ran LNVHW, or is there something else that would cause the Nvidia driver act up?

I would welcome any suggestions you may have!

Thanks![/QUOTE]

So I do recall having such issues trying to get s-video to work in that time frame of AGP cards. Niether the video cards nor the TV’s worked all that well. When VGA on a TV become common and video cards supported two connections, I have never looked back sense. Since TV s-video is an analog device, it does need to be connected to be detected and even then on some video cards, you had to select a TV was there because it could not be detected. I am not sure that this should cause the whole setup to blow up, but having problems with s-video connections is not a new issue. Unfortunately, I was a Windows user back then when I was using such equipement, but it did not work all that well. I recall having problems with overscan (where the picture goes over all four edges of the TV screen), linearity issues and the inability to read even 80 charater across text on the TV screen. Of course, playing a movie is less of a problem, if you can get a picture at all. So do indeed connect, power up and select s-video on the TV to see if that helps during the install and video detection of openSUSE. Anytime you are going with the built-in open source video driver, the newer the kernel, the newer the video driver.

Thank You,

user · February 17, 2013, 1:13am

Hi!
Need help!
I’m trying to use sandy on tumbleweed with NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18 / 310.32 and 3.7.7-24-desktop. Always get the message “No nVIDIA Driver Files were found”.
nVidia_folder="/home/spmaster/nvidia"
What am I doing wrong?
Thx!

jdmcdaniel3 · February 17, 2013, 5:52am

[QUOTE=spmaster;bt657]Hi!
Need help!
I’m trying to use sandy on tumbleweed with NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18 / 310.32 and 3.7.7-24-desktop. Always get the message “No nVIDIA Driver Files were found”.
nVidia_folder="/home/spmaster/nvidia"
What am I doing wrong?
Thx![/QUOTE]

So Normally, the default would be /home/yourname/Downloads and so either 1) No nVIDIA proprietary video driver files are being downloaded to “/home/spmaster/nvidia”, which is normally true as the Downloads folders is where they would go OR 2) SANDI does not like looking in a folder called nvidia for files that start with NVIDIA, but I am not sure about that. Since Downloads is the default download folder, why not set the nVidia_folder="/home/spmaster/Downloads"? And of course, I assume your user is called spmaster? Do you really keep or move your nVIDIA driver files to “/home/spmaster/nvidia”? Consider that SANDI can be particular with where she wants to put her things.

Thank You,

user · February 17, 2013, 10:10am

Hi and thanks for your response.

I already tried /home/spmaster/Downloads - the same result.
I even tried to put the drivers in /usr/local/bin/

spmaster@sac:~> ls /home/spmaster/Downloads/
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.32.bin NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.bin

its a kind of magic

jdmcdaniel3 · February 17, 2013, 10:54pm

[QUOTE=spmaster;bt659]Hi and thanks for your response.

I already tried /home/spmaster/Downloads - the same result.
I even tried to put the drivers in /usr/local/bin/

spmaster@sac:~> ls /home/spmaster/Downloads/
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.32.bin NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.bin

its a kind of magic[/QUOTE]

If this was me, I would download sandi again using this command:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sandi ; sudo wget -nc  http://paste.opensuse.org/view/download/53816310 -O /usr/local/bin/sandi ; sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sandi

I would then download this bash script and use it to edit sandi:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sysedit ; sudo wget -nc http://paste.opensuse.org/view/download/88360942 -O /usr/local/bin/sysedit ; sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sysedit

Then in Terminal run the command:

sysedit

Then see what you get after you edit the sandi script again. Most often errors that make no sense happens due to a corruption in the bash script. Lets try again and then get back with me.

Thank You,

user · February 18, 2013, 12:22am

Nothing :’(
I did everything by your instructions.

I’v tried something else: put the driver in the home directory of the root and used $HOME - didn’t help toо

May be something wrong because
locale
LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8 ?

Thank You

jdmcdaniel3 · February 18, 2013, 3:12am

[QUOTE=spmaster;bt662]Nothing :’(
I did everything by your instructions.

I’v tried something else: put the driver in the home directory of the root and used $HOME - didn’t help toо

May be something wrong because
locale
LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8 ?

Thank You[/QUOTE]

So I see the problem now. You have renamed your nVIDIA propritary video files files to *.bin from *.run.

spmaster@sac:~> ls /home/spmaster/Downloads/
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.32.bin NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.bin

Will work if it says …

spmaster@sac:~> ls /home/spmaster/Downloads/
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.32.run NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.run

Just like they come from a nVIDIA site download.

Thank You,

user · February 18, 2013, 6:10pm

it is not me, I swear! though, who else? lol!
Thank you very much! It works.

Another question - userfix will be run every system startup ( after make-dkms-installer was executed) ?

Thx again!

jdmcdaniel3 · February 19, 2013, 12:23am

[QUOTE=spmaster;bt666]it is not me, I swear! though, who else? lol!
Thank you very much! It works.

Another question - userfix will be run every system startup ( after make-dkms-installer was executed) ?

Thx again![/QUOTE]

The USERFIX bash script is run before your nVIDIA driver gets compiled into the kernel. If there are any tasks that needs to be run first, USERFIX can do it. I can up with this when a certain kernel version required a modification so that the nVIDIA driver could be installed and USERFIX could do that. Now, its there if you need it.

Thank You,

khaos337 · March 15, 2013, 3:20pm

Awesome script! Really helped me out!!

jdmcdaniel3 · May 5, 2013, 11:25pm

S.A.N.D.I. - SuSE Automated NVIDIA Driver Installer has been updated to Version 1.50 and in this release I have moved the run_dkms.service file to “/usr/lib/systemd/system/run_dkms.service” more in tune with how openSUSE 12.3 does it. I have added in a KDE and GNOME icon, for the desktop and for the Applications menu.

Thank You,

keoshy · September 16, 2013, 8:27am

“unable to determine the NVIDIA kernel module filename”
I get this error when I run SANDI script
I am using OpenSUSE 12.2 (I tryed also 12.3 but it doesn’t works) and NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.23-pkg1
someone can help me.
thanks…

jdmcdaniel3 · September 16, 2013, 2:31pm

[QUOTE=keoshy;bt916]“unable to determine the NVIDIA kernel module filename”
I get this error when I run SANDI script
I am using OpenSUSE 12.2 (I tryed also 12.3 but it doesn’t works) and NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.23-pkg1
someone can help me.
thanks…[/QUOTE]

nVIDIA driver 96.43.23 is kind of old and may not support dkms. Have you looked at this script: LNVHW - Load NVIDIA (driver the) Hard Way from runlevel 3 - Version 1.46 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums and what nVIDIA video chipset do you have?

Thank You,

user · September 20, 2013, 1:20pm

Is it possible to use your script to install NVIDIA driver on GeForce2 MX/MX 400?
OS: OpenSUSE 12.2 32bit
Kernel: 3.4.47-2.38.1
KDE: 3.5.10

lspci -v

03:02.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128]
Expansion ROM at fe6f0000 [disabled] [size=64]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: nouveau[/size][/size][/size]

jdmcdaniel3 · September 23, 2013, 3:59am

[QUOTE=freebg;bt918]Is it possible to use your script to install NVIDIA driver on GeForce2 MX/MX 400?
OS: OpenSUSE 12.2 32bit
Kernel: 3.4.47-2.38.1
KDE: 3.5.10

lspci -v

03:02.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128]
Expansion ROM at fe6f0000 [disabled] [size=64]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: nouveau[/QUOTE]

I you can install the driver manually, the script should work. If you are not sure, you might start off with the more simple script lnvhw which can be fore at the following link. The card you mention is old and so I just can’t say for sure.

LNVHW - Load NVIDIA (driver the) Hard Way from runlevel 3 - Version 1.46 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Thank You,[/size][/size][/size]