Is it just me?

Posted by Mark | Filed under Software

As I’ve men­tioned before I run SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro for my desk­top OS. My PC is one that I home-built with a bit of help from my local hard­ware guru (Eric). For my video card, I’ve got a BFG GeForce 5600 SE (or was did they call it an Ultra? *shrug*) with 256MB of Video RAM. I’m sub­scribed to the SuSE-Linux-e mail­ing list and it seems that I fre­quently see mes­sages com­ing into the list about peo­ple hav­ing all sorts of prob­lems installing the NVidia video card dri­vers. Now, I know that you can sup­pos­edly get the newest dri­vers from SuSE via YOU and that NVidia has some spe­cial instruc­tions for SuSE users on their linux dri­ver down­load page but really what’s all the fuss about? The first time I installed the dri­vers the spe­cial instruc­tions were out of date and YOU wasn’t show­ing the cur­rent dri­ver; so this is what I did then and do every­time I need to install the NVIDIA dri­vers1:

  1. Hit Crtl-Alt-F1 to get a text console.
  2. Logged on to my sys­tem as root.
  3. Typed in init 3.
  4. Waited for my sys­tem to fin­ish reboot­ing into text-only mode2
  5. Once I’m in text-only mode and logged in as root; if I haven’t down­loaded the newest dri­ver yet, I fire up lynx go to NVIDIA’s site and get the driver.
  6. Once I have the dri­ver, I exit lynx (if nec­es­sary) and then type sh ./NIVIDA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run, where XXXX is the ver­sion of the driver.
  7. This launches NVIDIA’s spe­cial dri­ver installer and I fol­low all the prompts in it. Their installer will check to see if it can down­load some extra files that it might be able to use instead of com­pil­ing them on the fly, but those files have yet to be out there. Then it works its magic and drops me back to the prompt.3
  8. Back at the prompt, I type sax2. This launches SuSE’s util­ity for con­fig­ur­ing your video card and mon­i­tor settings.
  9. I go into the mon­i­tor set­tings and con­firm that it’s detect­ing my mon­i­tor cor­rectly (it has every time so far).
  10. Then I go into the video card set­tings and res­e­lect my card. sax2 always defaults my card to the nv dri­ver and it needs to be the dri­ver for my spe­cific card.
  11. After res­e­lect­ing my card, I setup my dis­play set­tings (24-bit color at 1600x12004).
  12. Once I’m sat­is­fied with all my set­tings; I click Finish.
  13. sax2 then prompts me to see if I want to test my set­tings before I accept them and I click Yes.
  14. I think it’s while I’m in this test mode that sax2 allows me to adjust the how big of an image that my video card throws onto the mon­i­tor. Not the res­o­lu­tion but the actual dis­played image; a soft­ware ver­sion of the con­trols on the bot­tom of the mon­i­tor that allow you to adjust the image size, ori­en­ta­tion and what not. I use sax2 to adjust my screen until the dis­play is cen­tered and fits com­pletely on my mon­i­tor (no cut-off edges).
  15. Then I click Ok.
  16. This throws me back to the prompt where I type reboot -n.
  17. When my sys­tem comes back up; the new dri­vers are installed and I’m back in run­level 5 (graph­i­cal, multi-user). Every­thing looks sharp and my 3D stuff works. End of story. It sounds more com­pli­cated than it actu­ally is but from what I’ve been read­ing on the mail­ing list; this sure beats the stuff­ing out of how other peo­ple do it. :)

1 I’m writ­ing these instruc­tions up from mem­ory so there’s no guar­an­tee that they’re 100% accu­rate; how­ever they should be close enough for most peo­ple to fig­ure out what they’re doing.
2 For some rea­son my sys­tem always hangs at one point dur­ing this process; I think it’s while it’s try­ing to shut down a spe­cific process but the name of that process cur­rently is elud­ing my mem­ory. When I get to that point, I just hit Crtl-C and my PC will skip past the bad process.
3 Newer ver­sions of the Nvidia dri­ver com­plain that my ker­nel was built with RIVAFB sup­port and say that if the RIVAFB mod­ule gets loaded that it’ll cause me prob­lems but I just ignore that because I know the mod­ule never gets loaded. One of these days, I’ll have to fig­ure out how to recon­fig­ure my ker­nel so that sup­port isn’t in there. *shrug* That’s a project for another time.
4 Why yes, I do love hav­ing a 21″ mon­i­tor. *shame­less grin*

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About Mark McKibben

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

30 September 2004 | 6:05PM | Comments (0)

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