Linux Mint 12 hates Nvidia
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Feb 16, 2012 6:19 PM EDT |
O Mint Fans, I have a fresh Linux Mint 12 KDE 64-bit installation, and I want to install Nvidia drivers instead of Nouveau, which is OK for 2d stuff but not 3D. I can't even play Tux Racer, which is very very sad. My GPU is a GeForce 8400 GS. Mint 12 doesn't want to have anything to do with Nvidia. I followed these steps: Install nvidia-current and nvidia-settings Run nvidia-xconfig Blacklist the Nouveau module in /etc/default/grub Run update-grub2 reboot It boots to a black screen, and I have to reboot into rescue mode to make fixes. I've looked all over for a decent howto. Do I have to install from sources? Is there not an easy Mint way like there is for Debian? |
| gus3 Feb 16, 2012 6:42 PM EDT |
How about: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/176 |
| tuxchick Feb 16, 2012 7:53 PM EDT |
Got it. I downloaded the installer from Nvidia and followed their instructions. All it took was a squillionobytes of a build environment and kernel sources. |
| gus3 Feb 16, 2012 8:00 PM EDT |
But you have 2 squillionobytes of storage, right? |
| tuxchick Feb 16, 2012 8:06 PM EDT |
Oh, just a couple terabytes gus3. Nothing special. |
| Koriel Feb 16, 2012 8:54 PM EDT |
@tuxchick Just install jockey and let that handle the NVidia driver install, certainly worked for me and was very simple, this works with both KDE and Standard Mint install. Please note jockey is not available for the Debian editions as far as im aware. |
| tuxchick Feb 16, 2012 11:55 PM EDT |
Ah, now I know what jockey is. It's called 'additional drivers' in the system menu. And it doesn't detect that I installed the Nvidia drivers so it wants me to activate the Nvidia binary Xorg driver. Yay. I heart computers :) |
| Koriel Feb 17, 2012 12:49 AM EDT |
@tuxchick Ahh sorry about that I should of mentioned jockey is listed as "Additional Drivers" in the menus, my bad :) |
| tuxchick Feb 17, 2012 1:29 AM EDT |
Koriel, the naming confusion is not your fault. *insert ritual rant re get names right before making bling* |
| tracyanne Feb 17, 2012 5:22 AM EDT |
The only problem I've had with Nvidia drivers, is that everytime there's a kernel update I have to reactivate the nVidia drivers. Which means I have to end up doing a Windows style reboot. Reboot for the new kernel, restart the Video... in 2D, activate the nVidia driver that came with the distribution (so I can reactivate the current driver), then reactivate the current driver, then reboot. |
| helios Feb 17, 2012 7:39 AM EDT |
Yeah, see TA, that's really unacceptable and I've danced that dance before. However, I rarely update the Kernel unless I am missing or needing a feature that an update will accommodate. He!!, I'm still running (jaunts off to check uname -r) the uhhhh, 38.8 kernel. My machine at work is still running the .27 kernel from 9.04 I believe. Now understand, I am from the school of thought that states: "If it ain't broke, fix it til it is". But still, the Nvidia driver shuffle has me hesitating to update the kernel on a whim. You should see the lengths I take to avoid Dr's visits... Now on the other side of the video fence, I am known by an entire hacker space club here in Austin as "RadeonRage". I actually removed an ATI Radeon 5770 during a meet and with all my strength, slammed it to the concrete floor, spraying shrapnel 360 degrees across the room. I then lined up the biggest surviving parts and booted them like free kicks in a football match. Nothing earns one street cred like a full-blown psychotic meltdown. I still cannot say the word "Catalyst" without stuttering horribly and breaking out into sweats and experiencing full PTSD. So in all, Nvidia gets my "lesser of two evils" award for performance within the video realm. Don't even get me started with PulseAudio and the Soundblaster live cards. Someone could get hurt. |
| cr Feb 17, 2012 9:09 AM EDT |
@helios: Did you at least desolder the connectors first? There's good parts on them scrap boards! |
| helios Feb 17, 2012 12:05 PM EDT |
No cr, the only fortunate thing that came out of the incident was that there were not two of them in SLI or someone could have been hurt. I missed taking out a 32 inch Samsung monitor by mere inches. |
| Koriel Feb 17, 2012 1:50 PM EDT |
@helios Not just soundblaster but Turtlebeach (Crystal audio chipset) and Nvidia NF4 audio chipset, Pulseaudio even beats Unity out for sheer crapness. Its the first thing that gets the boot on any install I do, its easy to remove on Mint & PCLOS just fire up synaptic and remove it. For hissing, popping and crackling use Pulseaudio for everything else their is ALSA. As for Radeon, well I also have the aforementioned 5770, it now resides in a Windows only machine, Catalyst is pure cow dung which ive ranted about before here on Lxer my goal is to ensure that no linux user ever buys a Radeon. |
| helios Feb 17, 2012 2:18 PM EDT |
Koriel, I had three of them donated and we've since put them up on our ebay store for resale. I got 145.00 for each of them and the same guy bought all three. I did make sure he was a Windows user prior to selling them to him though..... |
| Koriel Feb 17, 2012 2:37 PM EDT |
Should also let folks know if your distro uses the dkms system for video driver installation then you shouldn't have to worry about kernel updates via the software/update manager disabling the driver, as the whole point of dkms is to avoid this.
If you manually install the driver then yes it will get broken on every kernel update. Both PCLOS and Mint use the DKMS system and you should be fine doing kernel updates via the software/update manager, manual kernel updates from source may also break drivers. |
| Khamul Feb 17, 2012 3:14 PM EDT |
@tracyanne: The easier way to handle kernel updates with the Nvidia binary drivers is, after you do an update that updates the kernel, before you reboot, issue the following command: "sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-*" where the last part is the names of all the nvidia driver packages (can't remember what they are at the moment; I don't have them installed now). There's a build script included with them that has to be run after you do a kernel update, so if you do a kernel update that doesn't also include updating the Nvidia drivers, you'll need to do this before you reboot to build the Nvidia drivers for that new kernel version. |
| jdixon Feb 17, 2012 4:44 PM EDT |
> ...then reactivate the current driver, then reboot. You shouldn't have to reboot to update an Xorg driver, merely restart X. Even if it's loading a kernal module, you should be able to do that without rebooting. |
| tracyanne Feb 17, 2012 5:19 PM EDT |
Yes JD I shouldn't, but sometimes I do, and I just find it easier to reboot anyway. |
| jdixon Feb 17, 2012 6:25 PM EDT |
> ...and I just find it easier to reboot anyway. Well, I can't argue with that. I've been known to do the same thing. |
| tuxchick Feb 17, 2012 7:50 PM EDT |
My Mint 12 adventure is going downhill fast. It's unstable, and stuff is broken. Like VLC will not play ISO images, and Kate and Kmail hang and don't want to die even with a kill -9. Something is messed up here, because I have Mint 11 KDE on a laptop and it just works. |
| tuxchick Feb 17, 2012 8:03 PM EDT |
Holy cow. When you go to Ubuntu.com now it hides all the other buntus. Not a sign of them anywhere. What a slap in the face to Lubuntu and Edubuntu and all the rest. |
| tuxchick Feb 17, 2012 8:06 PM EDT |
I hate to sound like $favorite-idiot-pundit, but desktop Linux should be a whole lot better now, not more aggravating. |
| claudecat Feb 18, 2012 4:10 AM EDT |
I find nvidia really easy to install/reinstall on any number of distros. Even without jockey. The nvidia website's .run file is a piece o' cake. Plus it's more up to date than the windows version, something I've never seen mentioned here or elsewhere. I agree that catalyst is troublesome, but often works on older cards at least. |
| helios Feb 18, 2012 6:10 AM EDT |
Same here TC....I'm on 11 until the Cinnamon dust settles. Vast improvements to come one can only hope. 11 is rock solid on my machines. |
| albinard Feb 18, 2012 10:29 AM EDT |
> What a slap in the face to Lubuntu and Edubuntu and all the rest. More than a slap, in fact it looks like anything but Unity is going to get at least ejected and at most exterminated. Do you suppose Steve Jobs' ghost has taken over control of Shuttleworth, and we will soon have lawsuits in which Ubuntu's form of *free* turns out to be not quite as free as anybody else's *free*? |
| Koriel Feb 18, 2012 11:48 AM EDT |
I have Linux Mint 12 with the XFCE desktop on 3 machines and don't have a single problem on them, other than my usual wireless drivers merry-go around that I have with pretty much every other distro other than PCLOS which is the only distro that wireless works out of the box for me (Broadcom sucks). Rock solid for me, in fact im well impressed as I had issues with 11 on my TV/Media machine which was related to a Flash vs Nvidia vs Kernel issues which has not reared its ugly head on 12. VLC seems fine as its my main media player but I never play ISO images so cant comment on that. |
| Fettoosh Feb 18, 2012 12:03 PM EDT |
Quoting:My Mint 12 adventure is going downhill fast. It's unstable, and stuff is broken. @TC, have you tried Kubuntu 11.10 with KDE 4.8? It is pretty stable and works fine for me except for Kmail, which I don't use. It would be nice to see how it works for you. Really, that is why I haven't switched to Lunux-mint and continue to use Kubuntu instead. |
| tuxchick Feb 18, 2012 12:48 PM EDT |
@Koriel, I tried jockey on a fresh Mint installation. It gave a sad error message that said the installation had failed, then after reboot the Nvidia driver was loaded and working perfectly. So aside from giving the wrong status message, Jockey is easy and it worked. |
| Khamul Feb 18, 2012 2:17 PM EDT |
@Fettoosh: Unless I'm mistaken, Kubuntu 11.10 uses KDE 4.7.4 (unless you've switched to a different KDE4.8 PPA or something). I'm pretty sure that's what my desktop PC at home is running. |
| Fettoosh Feb 18, 2012 2:29 PM EDT |
Quoting:unless you've switched to a different KDE4.8 PPA or something In deed I did and that is why I mentioned KDE 4.8. Kubuntu KDE 4.8 PPA |
| tuxchick Feb 18, 2012 2:39 PM EDT |
OK I'm getting Mint sorted out. This is tiring. I used to like mucking with the OS, now I just want the dratted thing to work with no backtalk :) I need to test KDE4 with all the bells and whistles. It's interesting that installing the Nvidia driver the Nvidia way resulted in problems, while using Jockey resulted in no problems. Except the bad error message. My new KDE4 desktop is like my old Fluxbox desktop with widgets, except glossier and way system-hoggier. |
| Koriel Feb 18, 2012 2:50 PM EDT |
My only problem with Mint as mentioned is wireless driver, I really cant see why they cant default to Ndiswrapper when a broadcom bcm43xx card is detected PCLOS manages it perfectly fine. Instead they default to the open source broadcom driver which requires firmware files and therefore doesnt work out of the box and even if you do have the firmware files it doesnt work reliably. It is a complete pain in the arse if you dont have access to a wired ethernet connection nearby so that you can go online to find out how to enable ndiswrapper as using the supplied ndisgtk doesnt fully enable it, it doesnt do all the blacklisting rigmarole which is required to get ndiswrapper working. |
| helios Feb 18, 2012 3:04 PM EDT |
Koriel, I have a backdoor solution that works for me but many would consider it impractical. I have two wireless devices I keep with me at all times and both of them employ an Atheros chip and work with every distro I've ever plugged them into. When I run into a machine that wants firmware for the driver or needs access to the net for NDISwrapper stuff, I just plug in one of the devices and get internet that way. No need for a hardwire solution and it works every time. Of course, I am out and about all day installing or fixing computers so my situation is different than most but I find that the 39.00 investment for both the devices from ebay saves me a million bucks in Tylenol for headaches. |
| ColonelPanik Feb 18, 2012 4:13 PM EDT |
Mint 11
Linux 2.6.38-8 Generic
GNOME 2.31.1
NVIDIA GeForce 310M w/270.41.06 driver Everything worked out of the box. Told me to get the restricted driver, automagic. I will upgrade when I am in hell. |
| montezuma Feb 18, 2012 4:35 PM EDT |
>I will upgrade when I am in hell. Oh you mean December 21 this year then http://www.greatdreams.com/end-world.htm |
| jdixon Feb 18, 2012 7:23 PM EDT |
> My only problem with Mint as mentioned is wireless driver, MInt update really doesn't seem to like our proxy at work. Ubuntu 10.04 handles it find, but Mint refuses to update, at least as of 11. I haven't tried 12, but I'm not optimistic. |
| helios Feb 18, 2012 7:35 PM EDT |
yep, I'm givin' 12 a wide berth until things settle with Cinnamon a bit. |
| tuxchick Feb 18, 2012 7:59 PM EDT |
Montezuma, the rapture came last year and scooped up the chosen. We are the damned. I'm having a pretty good time anyway. |
| tracyanne Feb 18, 2012 8:07 PM EDT |
I just installed LM 12 on a test machine it's running nVidia graphics cards, but it appears to be using FOSS drivers, interesting |
| helios Feb 18, 2012 11:59 PM EDT |
I'm beginning to think many of the problems with Linux wifi drivers lie in the firmware of the routers. I have several instances where the wireless shows it is connected but it won't show a web page. OR....it shows the wireless connection available but spins forever and won't connect to it. Often a firmware upgrade fixes it but if it's not your router, it's poor form to hack the router and update the firmware. Don't laugh....I've done it. |
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