Why can this OS installed on a portable drive boot on different machines?

English Hardware
#1

Hello, as it is indicated in my signature, I have this portable opensuse installed on a portable drive for about almost year.

It is still very stable even after I have upgraded it from opensuse 12.3. I have boot it on several different machines, from workstations to laptops.

I didn’t install any graphic card driver manually at all, however today I find that it has the nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop installed.

I wonder how it could boot up normally even on machines with ATI card. I had a laptop with ATI card but it boots there without a problem?

#2

Why should there be a problem?
Just having a kernel module installed doesn’t mean it is loaded. You have a lot more modules that you don’t use/need.

The kernel decides on boot which kernel modules have to be loaded. And even Xorg checks the hardware and only loads the appropriate drivers, as long as there is not one explicitely specified in the config.

With an ATI card the radeon kernel module gets loaded instead.

There are three possible problems with nvidia installed though:

  • if there is an xorg.conf that tells the system to use the nvidia driver, it will drop to text mode when you don’t have a supported nvidia card
  • the nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop package blacklists nouveau, so you cannot use that driver
  • if you also have x11-video-nvidiaG03 or (depending on the version) nvidia-glG03 installed, certain system libraries (namely libglx and Mesa-libGL1) get replaced by nvidia’s (incompatible) versions. This will break 3D (GLX) for all Mesa drivers, in particular intel and radeon.
#3

Yep, the Sax2 days was over in openSUSE world. Auto loading or detection is in play now with the gfx drivers afaik for normal situations :).

#4

Thank you wolfi for the explanation!

I am still confused a little here:

1.What is the fundamental graphic driver that is pre-installed with opensuse? Nouveau?

  1. Can I uninstall this nvidia-glG03? Is it better? (I checked and didn’t see x11-video-nvidia except x11-video-nouveau)

I just realized after reading your post that there are some kernel modules pre-installed like xf86-video-ati/nvidia. :slight_smile:

Final question:

Is it possible to install a propriety driver but be able to choose whether to boot with or without it during boot depending on the machine? Like in grub I can choose to boot with which kernel, can I also do it with say different graphic drivers? If it is very complicated to set up, I’ll just forget about it.

#5

Yes, for nvidia cards. But there are a lot of others as well, like intel and radeon.

  1. Can I uninstall this nvidia-glG03? Is it better? (I checked and didn’t see x11-video-nvidia except x11-video-nouveau)

If you don’t want to use the nvidia driver, you can (and should) uninstall all of its packages:
nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop and nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop (and all other flavors that may be installed), x11-video-nvidiaG03, nvidia-computeG03, nvidia-glG03
If you don’t have x11-video-nvidiaG03 installed, the most important part of the driver (namely the actual X driver) is missing anyway.

I just realized after reading your post that there are some kernel modules pre-installed like xf86-video-ati/nvidia. :slight_smile:

No, those are X drivers. The corresponding kernel modules are part of the standard kernel package (kernel-desktop f.e.).

Is it possible to install a propriety driver but be able to choose whether to boot with or without it during boot depending on the machine? Like in grub I can choose to boot with which kernel, can I also do it with say different graphic drivers? If it is very complicated to set up, I’ll just forget about it.

In theory, yes.
But because the nvidia driver replaces those 2 system libraries, you have to do some hackery so that those are only used with the nvidia driver and the standard ones otherwise. There are threads about this already.
I don’t know about the fglrx driver.

If you want to boot this system with different graphics cards, it’s better to stay with the standard opensource drivers. You don’t have to do anything special then, as everything is configured automatically and the correct driver will be loaded regardless of the graphics card.
As mentioned, it would actually be the same with the nvidia driver, but that one breaks the system’s GLX (i.e. 3D) support.

#6

OK. Thank you. I guess I’ll just uninstall those nvidia G03 drivers and stay with the open source drivers then. I don’t plan to play heavy game with this portable OS either.

#7

On 2014-06-17 15:46, bonedriven wrote:

> I did notice I somehow had nvidia community repos. Does it install this
> driver itself?

I would investigate how that “somehow” came to be. Repositories are not
activated automatically, the administrator has to do it “on purpose”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

#8

I was a complete noob during the time I set up this OS and couldn’t understand what I was doing. But I am sure I just didn’t manually install graphic driver for it as I knew I’d use it on different machines.

And I noticed that this nvidia driver installed isn’t actually from nvidia community later, but from the other repo I have. That’s why I edited that part you quoted out.

#9

Yes, a driver can be installed automatically if it is in an activated repo and you have the appropriate hardware.

The driver tells YaST (libzypp’s solver actually) via RPM dependencies which hardware devices it supplements, so it will get treated as a recommended package when such a hardware is present and with the default settings, recommended packages are installed automatically.

#10

Thanks. That clears the last myth I have.