Category: NVidia

Ubuntu 14.04: Hybrid Graphics

sphillips My Inspiron 17R, NVidia, Ubuntu 14.04, Uncategorized Leave a comment

This is part of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop.  In the previous post, I worked through installing Virtualbox for VMs.  In this post, I am working through installing the video drivers for optimal use of the video cards.  My laptop has a hybrid graphics card, so I attempted to use Nvidia Prime.  When that didn’t work, I dropped back to Bumblebee.

Just so you can see what I have, I looked in lspci.  Here’s the Nvidia controller:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 650M] (rev a1)

Here’s the Intel controller:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

 

Here’s what I did…

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X Configuration for My ESA Plasma TV

digitaleagle NVidia, Troubleshooting, Ubuntu, Uncategorized Leave a comment

We bought a TV a while ago with the thought that one day we could hook the computer up to it.  Well, that day has come, but I had trouble getting it to display correctly.

I enabled the restricted drivers for the nvidia video card.  I could run nvidia-settings to configure the displays.

I had to add some options to me screen section in the xorg.conf to make it look like this:

Section “Screen”
Identifier     “Screen0”
Device         “Device0”
Monitor        “Monitor0”
DefaultDepth    24
Option         “TwinView”
Option         “NoTwinViewXineramInfo” “1”
Option         “metamodes” “1024x768_85,NULL”
Option         “TwinViewOrientation” “RightOf”
Option         “ModeValidation” “AllowNon60HzDFPModes,NoEdidModes,NoEdidDFPMaxSizeCheck,NoVertRefreshCheck,NoHorizSyncCheck,NoMaxSizeCheck,NoDFPNativeResolutionCheck”
Option         “UseEDID” “FALSE”
SubSection     “Display”
Depth       24
EndSubSection
EndSection
Then, I found a nice tool to generate mode lines.  I put the modeline in the monitor section:

Section “Monitor”

# HorizSync source: builtin, VertRefresh source: builtin
Identifier     “Monitor0”
VendorName     “Unknown”
ModelName      “CRT-0”
HorizSync       28.0 – 55.0
VertRefresh     43.0 – 72.0
Option         “DPMS”
ModeLine       “1024x768_85”     69.54   1024 1056 1320 1352    576  586  594  605
EndSection

Resources

Options for xorg.conf

Modeline Tools

NVidia Drivers for Fedora 9 Update

digitaleagle Fedora, Laptop, NVidia, Troubleshooting, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Ok, Fedora 9 was released yesterday, and the driver issue was not fixed.

As far as I can find on the Internet, Xorg 7.4 is supposed to come out this month (May 2008).  An exact date is not mentioned anywhere.  I read somewhere that NVidia will wait until Xorg releases the version before releasing their driver.

In the meantime, RandR is my goal.  I want to take advantage of this new feature:
Xorg RandR 1.2 howto

Resources

The Progress of X.Org 7.4

Email on Fedora’s Involvement

X.Org Website

Nvidia Drivers for Fedora 9

digitaleagle Fedora, Laptop, NVidia, Uncategorized 8 Comments

This will probably be fixed by the time Fedora 9 is released, but I had trouble getting the NVidia drivers to work.

I tried the rpm packages from AtRPMS, but I couldn’t get them to work.  First of all, they forced me to downgrade to the kernel version 2.6.25-1 (I was at 2.6.25-8).  Then, they didn’t install the nvidia-settings program and didn’t update xorg.conf.  Finally, when I tried to update xorg.conf, XWindows wouldn’t start.

So, I decided to manually install the drivers.

The latest version that I found on the website was:

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run

I had to update to the latest kernel release again because I couldn’t find drivers for the one that I was on.  And, when I tried to compile it, I got an error.  Looking in /var/log/nvidia-installer.log, I found:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c: In function
‘nv_flush_caches’:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c:364: error:
implicit declaration of function ‘global_flush_tlb’
make[4]: *** [/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.
o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/n
v] Error 2
make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2
NVIDIA: left KBUILD.
nvidia.ko failed to build!
make[1]: *** [module] Error 1
make: *** [module] Error 2

Then, I found an FTP link where later drivers were listed.  I tried the 173.08 version.  After manually deleting a broken link created by the previous install (/usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so), it compiled without a problem.  But, I could not start the XWindows.

Here is what I got:
(EE) module ABI major version (0) doesn't match the server's version (1)
(EE) Failed to load module "glx" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
This server has a video driver ABI version of 4.0 that this
driver does not officially support. Please check
http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X
server with a supported driver ABI.
=================================================================
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so: undefined symbol: miZeroLineScreenIndex
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so
(EE) Failed to load module "wfb" (loader failed, 7)
(EE) NVIDIA(0): This video driver ABI is not supported.
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.

The best information that I can find so far, is that NVidia does not support the latest version of XWindows yet.

Conclusion

So far, I have determined I have to wait for NVidia to update their drivers.  I am hoping they will have it done in the next couple of weeks only because Fedora 9’s release dates is in 14 days.

Resources

Thread pointing to the latest drivers

Thread on incompatibility

Advanced Driver Search

Another Thread