Solving Display Problems With Some NVIDIA Chipsets After Installing Slackware 13.37 or SalixOS 13.37

Sigh. Someday this won't be a big fat pain. When? When we all switch to Macs.

The problem, from what I can tell, is that distributions were premature in switching to nouveau. As of a year ago when Slackware 13.37 and SalixOS 13.37 were released a lot of chipsets were unsupported and I know of several which simply were misconfigured. I tried Vector Linux Light recently with a newer kernel and X and it just worked on my desktop. I did help someone sort out a misconfigured chipset in the Vector Linux forums a few weeks back so while things are getting better they still have a ways to go.

The comparison to MacOS is a bit unfair. They support a very limited hardware set while Linux tries to support everything. Apple devs have a much easier task on their hands.

I don't think using Apple hardware will cause your Linux nvidia drivers to function any better...

:P

~Jeff

@Jeff91: you're right, of course. LOL. OTOH, if an NVIDIA chipset is used by Apple in their hardware I'd bet dollars to donuts that it works correctly in MacOS. I wish I could say the same for Linux.

BTW, to realize how sure I am of that bet, Passover starts at sundown so I wouldn't even be able to eat the donuts if I won :)

Pass the donuts over here, we'll eat them for you

ta, Jeff didn't take my bet, so no donuts. I'm afraid they'd be stale by the time they'd get to Australia anyway.

I have a donut in my car trunk.... er, boot. And I know it won't go stale.

It might go flat though; you should be sure to check your spare tire inflation pressure at least every year.

@khamul: that's easy: the more donuts, the higher the spare tire inflation.

Installing Nvidia drivers has been ghastly as long as I can remember. It used to be that using the Nvidia method was the most reliable. Then for a brief shining moment a lot of distros had nice helper scripts that did the job. But that was then. Now you have to take extra steps to keep Nouveau the heck out of the way like Caitlyn outlined (thanks Caitlyn!), which are different on every distro, and it's worse than ever.

@tuxchick: You're welcome.

It's bad enough that even Slackware, known for keeping everything vanilla and doing little or no customization, came up with a little helper package for blacklisting Nouveau. So, yeh, I agree, NVIDIA is a pain unless your chipset is well supported by Nouveau and X autoconfiguration actually works right.

Quoting: I don't think using Apple hardware will cause your Linux nvidia drivers to function any better...

I almost laughed!

;)

Linux Mint 12 + KDE with jockey-kde installed. Installing NVidia drivers was a simple matter of selecting the one I want and rebooting.

TC, I have Mint 12 with KDE4 on two PCs. Jockey didn't do a thing except fail. I'm not going to outline all the different methods I tried to get the Nvidia driver installed and working; the short story is after a half day of wasted effort and aggravation one works and the other doesn't. I'm not going to detail all the other machines I've had Nvidia installation fun on either. Nouveau gets in the way, getting it out of the way is distro-dependent voodoo, and this is a ridiculous state of affairs for what should be an automatic process.

Hey, if I wanted my system to slow down and pause and use lots more memory I could run Linux Mint 12 and KDE 4. I prefer a lighter environment and the fact is that the instructions I laid out aren't all that difficult. I'll stick with SalixOS and Xfce.

Well I do buy my computers with Linux pre installed, so maybe that's the difference.

Also using Linux Mint 12 here with jockey-gtk and an NV6800 and an NV7300 on two different machines without any hassles.

I also run XFCE as my default DE with 125MB ram usage from cold boot so Mint 12 is pretty good once its tweaked.