The usual NVIDIA Problems

English Hardware
1

This is ridiculous - I have been spending over eight hours yesterday and today trying to get an NVIDIA 9800GT installed on openSUSE 11.

Nothing in the usual instructions works even close.

Here is the tale of woe:

Tried One-Click Install:

Downloads, claims installation successful.

Do “sax -r”, I get this:

Current configuration will not be read in.
access to your display has been granted

Then I get a console screen with a ton of error messages

Then I get this helpful response:

ups lost card during probing…abort
Something went wrong while X was called with -probeonly
try to call sax2 -p and select a single device.

So I tried sax2 -p and I get a list that shows the onboard 8300 and the framebuffer device - not 9800GT at all.

I try the sax2 -r 0=NVIDIA, get the same thing as above.

I run the configure Nvidia Server settings, I get:

You do not appear to be using the Nvidia driver

and tells me to run the nvidia config thingy

Now I can’t even quit out of the Nvidia server settings applet! Brilliant programming!

So I try it the old way, download the current kernel source (after one bad start getting the wrong kernel source).

Switch to /usr/src/kernel-2.6.25.5-1.1, run makeoldconfig

Download the nvidia install script NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.82-pkg2.run

Try to run it, I get:

First time: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h does not exist because I hadn’t installed the source the first time

Second time after installing Base System, C/C++ Development, and Kernel Development patterns, I get:

Unable to load kernel module ‘nvidia.ko’ This usually happens when the kernel module is built against the wrong or improperly configured kernel source, with a version of gcc that differs from the one used to build the target kernel, or if a driver such as rivafb/nvidiafb is present and prevents the kernel modiule from obtaining ownership of the NVIDIA grahics device.

See log entries ‘kernel module load error’ and ‘kernel messages’ at end of /var/log/nvidia-installer.log

Which in turn says some gibberish like:

no version for struct_module’ found: kernel tainted
module license ‘NVIDIA’ taints kernel
unknown symbol i2c_del_adapter
unknown sumbol i2c_add_adapter

Folks, this is ridiculous. I am not an expert at compiling the kernel. I don’t even know what “configuring your kernel sources” actually means in terms of steps to be done. Google was no help. I found one place that said do the following:

make oldconfig
make modules_prepare
make modules

When I did that, it took forever to do step three. I did only step one on the current kernel sources, do I need to do all three?

I need a step by step on how to get an ASUS 9800GT video card installed on openSUSE 11 which actually explains how to do it, including all the steps to insure that the right kernel is present, configured properly, etc.

None of the existing HOWTO’s do this - they assume you know all about kernel compiling, etc.

I never had to do all this when I installed a NVIDIA card in my other openSUSE 10.3 machine! What has changed? Why all these errors?

Nobody except a hardcore Linux person could possibly install a video card with this sort of situation. I’ve used Linux for several years now as my primary desktop OS, and I can usually figure out what is going on, but this has me stumped.

There has to be an easier way to install a video card than this!

Oh, hardware: I’m running 64-bit openSUSE 11.0 on a AMD Quad-Core 9650 AM2+ CPU, ASUS MB M3N78, 4GB RAM, 1TB HD. This is a brand new install of OpenSUSE yesterday on a new machine.

By the way, the first install failed miserably. I forgot to hook up the network cable and when the install got to the test network part, of course it failed. It reported the installation failed, but when I rebooted everything was fine. Except after hours of installing software, I rebooted and it REPEATED that the installation had failed, and I had to reconfigure everything. Then it did that again, so I wiped that install and reinstalled with the network hooked up and everything seems fine.

This has been a two-day install so far, with this NVIDIA nonsense.

2

remove any repo packages of nvidia
try:

Alright so here is how to install the nvidia driver manually, in case the one in the repo doesn’t work or u just want to use the latest.

Go to Yast>Software>Software Management

Search for and install if you don’t have these:

make
gcc
kernel-source

Now download the latest Nvidia driver:

Place the file in your /home/username

Now restart and at the boot screen, pause the boot by moving the down button, then move back up and clear any text in the boot arguments by holding backspace. Then just type the number: 3
At the login

Type “root” then enter and then your root password and press enter.

now type
cd /home/username

*Now remember you can use the {TAB} key to auto complete

so type:
sh NVIDIA{TAB}
and the whole file name should auto complete

eg: sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.09-pkg1.run

Follow the installer and let it compile the kernel module for you.
Say Yes to everything
Use TAB to move around
reboot

3

The instructions given by caf4926 should work really well. Just wanted to comment on the topic title.The problems may be usual for you but most of us have no problems at all with nvidia cards

Geoff

4

Worked fine.

However, this was only because I did a complete reinstall. I also discovered a couple other problems with the way the store people set up the BIOS.

They set the BIOS to treat the SATA drives as AHCI instead of IDE - this caused almost no other OS or utility I tried to access the system with to work because of the lack of SATA drivers. So I reset it to IDE. Not relevant to the Nvidia problem, but caused me no end of grief because openSUSE reinstalls were hanging on the probe for preexisting system files for some reason, and I wanted to reformat the disk to stop that and nothing I had could access the machine! A nightmare… It also changes the way the DVD is viewed by the system - under AHCI it’s a “P3-ATAPI iHAS12”, under IDE it’s “CD-ROM” - which makes a hell of a lot more sense in the boot launch order!

Then I noticed in the BIOS as well that the idiots had left the onboard video “always enabled” instead of “auto” which disables the onboard when an external PCIe card is detected. I think THAT was screwing up the video card detection process.

In any event, I did a complete reinstall, this time including installing the “Base Development”, “KDE Development”, “C/C++ Development”, and “Kernel Development” patterns as well as including “kernel docs” and “kernel syms”.

The hardware configuration portion of the install detected the graphics as “VESA Framebuffer Graphics” and the 22" Acer monitor as VESA 1280x1024 @ 60Hz (10 inches, aspect) - (1280x1024) whatever that gibberish means. 10 inches? Colordepth was 16 bit.

So it appears neither the onboard nor the PCIe video was detected.

After initial boot, I ran a full update, downloading 253 packages, 1.75GB of updates - the largest update process I’ve ever seen in any Linux install I’ve done.

Did a reboot for a new Linux kernel: 2.6.25.18-0.2. Since I installed all the devel stuff, I got the right kernel source and everything else was in synch.

I had no repo packages of nvidia to remove since it was never detected in the first place.

I had make, gcc, and kernel-source was correct this time.

I downloaded the nvidia AMD64 driver, installed as usual with no problems. Ran the nvidia-xconfig to set up the Xorg.conf.

As for most people not having problems installing Nvidia, my Google experience over the past day says otherwise.

The reality is that this is a truly pathetic way to install video. Nvidia and the distros need to come up with something considerably easier. If nothing else, as soon as it’s known someone wants to use an nvidia card (and the system installer should ask), the system installer should make sure that everything needed to run the install script is present. You can’t expect a new Linux user to know he needs kernel source - or even what the hell that is, let alone make and gcc. I don’t care that here are five hundred different Linux kernels for Nvidia to worry about - they make one **** Windows installer (or two, one for 64-bit), they can just as easily make the **** thing not dependent on the specific Linux kernel.

It’s just brain dead. Next to problems with wireless, installing video is probably the hardest thing in Linux for new users. If somebody like me who’s used Linux as their primary OS for several years now can run into this, I shudder to think what a more naive user would do.

Well, I think it’s working now. I haven’t tried any of the Compiz stuff yet. I dread trying to get that to work and I don’t really need it.

Anyway, thanks for the assistance. Now let’s see what else I can screw up as I continue loading up my new openSUSE 11.0. And then in a couple weeks, 11.1 comes out and I can screw it up some more…