video problems on Sony Vaio VPCF115FM with nvidia GT 330m

English Hardware
1

I have a Sony Vaio VPCF115FM with a nvidia GT 330m and I installed openSUSE 11.2 on it. I’m having problems getting X to work with anything other then vesa. When using the nvidia driver when X starts the display turns off and I have to reboot the computer to get it to turn back on (I can still ssh into the laptop when the display is off). When using version 190.53 of the nvidia driver I get the following message in my Xorg.0.log:

(WW) Jan 25 13:29:24 NVIDIA(0): ACPI: Error: Unable to find the DOS (Enable/Disable output
(WW) Jan 25 13:29:24 NVIDIA(0):     switching) file path under /proc/acpi/video. The NVIDIA X
(WW) Jan 25 13:29:24 NVIDIA(0):     driver will not be able to respond to ACPI display change
(WW) Jan 25 13:29:24 NVIDIA(0):     hotkey events.

I tried installing version 195.30 of the nvidia drivers from their ftp site and now in my Xorg.0.log I get the following error:

(II) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 330M (GT216) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)
(--) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): Memory: 1048576 kBytes
(--) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 70.16.45.00.05
(II) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): Detected PCI Express Link width: 16X
(--) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): Interlaced video modes are supported on this GPU
(--) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s) on GeForce GT 330M at PCI:1:0:0:
(--) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0):     none
(EE) Jan 25 13:43:10 NVIDIA(0): No display devices found for this X screen.
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(II) UnloadModule: "wfb"
(II) UnloadModule: "fb"
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get this working?

2

I can’t see a driver for this in the list at nvidia
Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers

Is it actually supported?

3

When I look at the nVidia documentation for the 190.53 driver, I do not see your card listed, which suggests to me that card is not supported by the 190.53 proprietary driver:
Appendix*A.*Supported NVIDIA GPU Products - 190.53 driver

When I search the 195.30 driver readme, I also see no mention of its support: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/195.30/README/supportedchips.html

I confess, I know very very little about proprietary drivers, and also nothing about your model Sony Vaio VPCF115FM laptop. Did you read anything to suggest the proprietary driver supports that model graphic device ?

4

I had read that some people using different models of the Vaio with a GT 330m had it working in linux with the nvidia driver. I found out that with version 190.53 of the nvidia driver the card works, it’s just not detecting my laptop’s lcd. I can plug a monitor into the vga port with that driver and it works, but the built in lcd on the laptop doesn’t.

5

Hi, even though it’s not in the list of officially supported cards, it works on my VPCF115FM. The trick is to rip the EDID information from the windows registry and feed it to the nvidia driver manually. Details: Laptop Forums and Notebook Computer Discussion - View Single Post - Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge

Caveats:

  • switching to text console does not set the video mode correctly (blank screen)
  • I had two kind-of-crashes in the last two days: kwin would eat 100%, desktop blocked and be unkillable, so I suspect a graphics driver bug (to be expected), machine could still be reached over the network, but no clean shutdown possible

Tilman