Hey,
I tried it. The short answer is that nVIDIA cards are OK for text, but may not work at all under X.
I downloaded the 3.3 ISO's, and burned new CD's. I did an X desktop install on a test bench P3 600 MHz system with a 4.3 gig drive. I did the install with a known-to-work Voodoo Banshee card to get the system going. I used a Mag DX1495 monitor, which I know does not to work on Linux with nVIDIA cards (but which works just fine running Windows with nVIDIA cards).
Everything installed OK with only a minor glitch toward the end (just when going into the reboot, after setting up the monitor and display card, there were some messages about cannot find some graphics files).
After going into my regular user account and adjusting some preferences, I shut the system down, replaced the Voodoo Banshee card with an nVIDIA Riva TNT 2 card, and restarted the computer. During startup, kudzu detected the hardware change, and configured the machine for the new card following my confirmation. (Windows can do this automatically, why not Linux?)
Sure enough, when X tried to load, the screen went blank. Not only did the screen go blank for the X console #7, but the screen was blank for the 6 other consoles as well. I knew this because I could change to my favorite with F2, then Ctl-Alt-del to reboot. The screen stayed blank until the computer began the new boot, when the screen came back.
This was exactly the situation under CentOS 3.1.
Moral of the nVIDIA story: if the monitor/display card/motherboard combination works for you, great. If not, using a display card from a different manufacturer may be the best solution.
IMHO.
Rick
Hello Rick,
I have to say, I found your notice of nVidia cards "not working" as a little odd. To begin with -- drivers *generally* do not vary between distributions of linux. So, the fact that your card "doesn't work" with CentOS means that something else went wrong -- not that the drivers don't exist, or don't function properly.
First of all, I'd be interested to see where your conclusion that your monitor doesn't work with an nVidia card in linux came from -- what exactly did you experience/test to come to this statement?
I don't know anything about Kudzu, but, let me tell you, the nVidia Riva TNT 2 is ABSOLUTELY supported by the linux kernel -- and XFree86 ABSOLUTELY runs on it. If it's not working on your system, instead of making conclusions about Linux as a whole, understand that there are probably issues with the configuration files you either manually wrote, or the programs CentOS/RHEL bundles with the distro did.
nVidia cards have the absolute best support under linux of any video card -- and I highly doubt what you experienced was a driver issue -- if it was, it was because of some mangled patch that RedHat applied, because the driver for nVidia TNTs is used by tens of thousands of Linux users.
Thank You, Christopher Blume
Rick Graves wrote:
Hey,
I tried it. The short answer is that nVIDIA cards are OK for text, but may not work at all under X.
I downloaded the 3.3 ISO's, and burned new CD's. I did an X desktop install on a test bench P3 600 MHz system with a 4.3 gig drive. I did the install with a known-to-work Voodoo Banshee card to get the system going. I used a Mag DX1495 monitor, which I know does not to work on Linux with nVIDIA cards (but which works just fine running Windows with nVIDIA cards).
Everything installed OK with only a minor glitch toward the end (just when going into the reboot, after setting up the monitor and display card, there were some messages about cannot find some graphics files).
After going into my regular user account and adjusting some preferences, I shut the system down, replaced the Voodoo Banshee card with an nVIDIA Riva TNT 2 card, and restarted the computer. During startup, kudzu detected the hardware change, and configured the machine for the new card following my confirmation. (Windows can do this automatically, why not Linux?)
Sure enough, when X tried to load, the screen went blank. Not only did the screen go blank for the X console #7, but the screen was blank for the 6 other consoles as well. I knew this because I could change to my favorite with F2, then Ctl-Alt-del to reboot. The screen stayed blank until the computer began the new boot, when the screen came back.
This was exactly the situation under CentOS 3.1.
Moral of the nVIDIA story: if the monitor/display card/motherboard combination works for you, great. If not, using a display card from a different manufacturer may be the best solution.
IMHO.
Rick
On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 19:13 -0700, Rick Graves wrote:
Hey,
I tried it. The short answer is that nVIDIA cards are OK for text, but may not work at all under X.
I downloaded the 3.3 ISO's, and burned new CD's. I did an X desktop install on a test bench P3 600 MHz system with a 4.3 gig drive. I did the install with a known-to-work Voodoo Banshee card to get the system going. I used a Mag DX1495 monitor, which I know does not to work on Linux with nVIDIA cards (but which works just fine running Windows with nVIDIA cards).
Everything installed OK with only a minor glitch toward the end (just when going into the reboot, after setting up the monitor and display card, there were some messages about cannot find some graphics files).
After going into my regular user account and adjusting some preferences, I shut the system down, replaced the Voodoo Banshee card with an nVIDIA Riva TNT 2 card, and restarted the computer. During startup, kudzu detected the hardware change, and configured the machine for the new card following my confirmation. (Windows can do this automatically, why not Linux?)
Sure enough, when X tried to load, the screen went blank. Not only did the screen go blank for the X console #7, but the screen was blank for the 6 other consoles as well. I knew this because I could change to my favorite with F2, then Ctl-Alt-del to reboot. The screen stayed blank until the computer began the new boot, when the screen came back.
This was exactly the situation under CentOS 3.1.
Moral of the nVIDIA story: if the monitor/display card/motherboard combination works for you, great. If not, using a display card from a different manufacturer may be the best solution.
IMHO.
Rick
Rick,
The issue is as it was with CentOS 3.1 ... and it probably concerns either a NFORCE2 motherboard (Which requires the kernel-unsupported and kernel-source packages to be installed ... and it is not installed by the default install) ... AND/OR the video card is higher than an FX5200, and requires the kernel-source package and the binary drivers from NVIDIA to be installed.
When booting the machine, press "a" at the kernel selection screen to append the run level and add a "SPACE" and a "3" (no quotes, just spacebar and 3) to boot in test mode, then do:
yum install kernel kernel-source kernel-unsupported
(if the kernel is upgraded, boot to the new kernel in runlevel 3 again)
then get the latest nvidia drivers with:
wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-6111/NVIDIA-Linux- x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run
Then do:
chmod 755 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg1.run
then do:
IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=YES ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run
Then edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config file and remove (or remark out) anything having to do with "dri" and change the driver line to:
Driver "nvidia"
--------------------------- This scenario also requires that the binary driver be recompiled every time the kernel is changed. ---------------------------
See my page on this issue for details:
http://www.hughesjr.com/content/view/34/2/Site_News
--------------------------
This problem is caused by 2 things ... RedHat not loading all kernel drivers (ie, having a kernel-unsupported package) and NVIDIA not providing the code for their hardware to the open source community (requiring a binary, closed source driver to be installed and recompiled at every kernel upgrade).
------------------------- Johnny Hughes http://www.hughesjr.com/
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Christopher Blume -
Johnny Hughes -
Rick Graves