Jay Leafey wrote:

BRUCE STANLEY wrote:

...

I am having some issues (e.g. System lock ups) with my ATI 9250 Video card.

I am thinging about replacing it with either a Nvidia

FX5200, FX5500, or a FX5600 card.

Is anyone using one of these cards on Centos 4.1 with the stock (XORG) nv driver?

I'm currently using an nVidia FX 5600 card on my workstation running CentOS 4.4. I used the XORG nv driver for a while with good, stable results, but switched to the nVidia-provided driver for better 3D performance. Gotta be able to play Quake 4, don't you know!

For anything that does not require 3D, tho, the nv driver seems to work just fine.

How about dual head setup?

Alfred von Campe wrote:

Well, we don't use 3D, but we ended up using the nvidia driver so we could drive the LCD monitor at its native resolution and frequency (1600x1200 @ 60Hz). I first tried using the onboard video chip (Intel 9XX) on our workstations, but it couldn't drive 1600x1200 at the right frequency. I then purchased some inexpensive nVidia GeForce 6200 cards, but I had to install the nVidia driver for them to work properly at 1600x1200 using the DVI connector (I forgot exactly what the problem was). But installing the nVidia driver solved all the problems.

Since you've already gone to the nVidia card it's a little late, I know, but one of my Dell workstations has a similar display chip (Intel 915G) and I was able to drive my Dell 2100fp at 1600x1200@60Hz by making a couple of changes in the xorg.conf file. Specifically, in the "Monitor" section I added a modeline for the that resolution with some different timings:

ModeLine "1600x1200" 160.0 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201 1204 1250

Then in the "Screen" section I added 1600x1200 to the "Modes" line:

Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

Les filling, tastes great!

The only issue is that I have to re-install the driver whenever there is a new kernel. I haven't dug deep enough to figure out how to install the driver in a newly installed but not yet running kernel. I usually just manually change the runlevel to 3 at boot time, install the driver, and then switch to runlevel 5. But that requires physical access to each workstation. Since there is a new kernel waiting to be installed by yum at the moment, maybe I will take the time to figure out how to do this now. I did manage to hijack the firstboot mechanism, so that after I kickstart a system it automatically installs the driver before going to runlevel 5.

It's not that hard, thankfully. You can specify the kernel version to the installer script, as well as just installing a new kernel module rather than a full reinstall:

/usr/local/bin/nvidia-installer --kernel-module-only --kernel-name=(kernel version)

For example, when the new kernel (kernel-2.6.9-42.0.3.plus.c4) came out, I just ran this command before rebooting to the new kernel:

/usr/local/bin/nvidia-installer --kernel-module-only --kernel-name=2.6.9-42.0.3.plus.c4

It does require that the kernel-devel{,-smp} package be installed for the kernel for which you want to rebuild the driver, but that's not really a problem for me. I've been trying to figure out how to make this happen at boot-time before starting X, but haven't pursued it too hard.

Hope that helps!

Jay Leafey jay.leafey@mindless.com wrote: BRUCE STANLEY wrote:

I am having some issues (e.g. System lock ups) with my ATI 9250 Video card.

I am thinging about replacing it with either a Nvidia

FX5200, FX5500, or a FX5600 card.

Is anyone using one of these cards on Centos 4.1 with the stock (XORG) nv driver?

I'm currently using an nVidia FX 5600 card on my workstation running CentOS 4.4. I used the XORG nv driver for a while with good, stable results, but switched to the nVidia-provided driver for better 3D performance. Gotta be able to play Quake 4, don't you know!

For anything that does not require 3D, tho, the nv driver seems to work just fine.

BRUCE STANLEY wrote:

I am probably going to pick up a NVIDIA card this week end. What is the best way to install the new card and XORG driver?

Using a command line utility (maybe at init 3 level?),

Should I:

  1). Put the new card in, boot up, and then try to install the XORG
       driver for the NVIDIA.

or

  2). With the ATI card still in, change the driver to the NVIDIA one,
       shut down, and then reboot.

or 3). some other approach.

I have not tried changing drivers after Centos has already bee installed on a system. I not even sure what command line utility to use. I use to know it for the XFREE86 drives (RHEL 3).

The way I have changed video drivers in the past was to use system-config-display to force creation of a new xorg.conf file. If you just want to use the "nv" provided with XORG you won't have to install anything.

To do this, reboot the machine in runlevel 3. Log in as root, and run system-config-display, forcing a reconfiguration operations:

system-config-display --reconfig

When the configuration dialog comes up, select the "Hardware" tab and make sure the monitor and video card were detected properly. If the video card isn't already set properly, change it to "NVIDIA GeForce FX (generic)" as there does not appear to be a setting specifically for the FX 5600. Click "OK", then run "startx" to test the configuration. If it comes up OK, you can log out of the X session and either reboot or use "telinit 5" to switch to X Window mode.

Hope that helps!