OpenSUSE 12.1 Nvidia Drivers

Gore, This ones for you :D


So, I'm trying to go full Linux and I happened try SUSE once before and liked it. Especially, since I had a really hard time with Solaris......anyway SUSE actually installed with a decent resolution and sound. Something that Solaris apparently had a really hard time with. However, it didn't have the right resolutions for my hardware. After doing some serious research, I managed to install the latest Nvidia 295.33 proprietary driver through the use of SANDI. But for some reason resolution was still a problem. I tried to edit my xorg.conf file and I managed to get a decent resolution but none that my monitor supported. I read somewhere that it may be mistaken my LCD for a CRT. I am using a dvi to vga adapter which might be causing problems, I'm not too sure. If I can find a loose dvi cable around somewhere I'll give that a go and see what happens. But so far I am kinda stumped. I have a little Linux experience, but I'm no guru.

My hardware consist of:
AMD Phenom x4 955
4gbs of ddr2 ram
700gb sata hdd
onboard Nvidia Geforce 8200 but registers as 9200??
Nvidia Geforce 8800gt

This board uses a Hybrid SLI system, so I dont know if that might mess anything up or not.

BTW. My goal here is to have no reason to dual boot windows.......lol

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Originally Posted by chaosclown

Gore, This ones for you :D


So, I'm trying to go full Linux and I happened try SUSE once before and liked it. Especially, since I had a really hard time with Solaris......anyway SUSE actually installed with a decent resolution and sound. Something that Solaris apparently had a really hard time with. However, it didn't have the right resolutions for my hardware. After doing some serious research, I managed to install the latest Nvidia 295.33 proprietary driver through the use of SANDI. But for some reason resolution was still a problem. I tried to edit my xorg.conf file and I managed to get a decent resolution but none that my monitor supported. I read somewhere that it may be mistaken my LCD for a CRT. I am using a dvi to vga adapter which might be causing problems, I'm not too sure. If I can find a loose dvi cable around somewhere I'll give that a go and see what happens. But so far I am kinda stumped. I have a little Linux experience, but I'm no guru.

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I know this might be surprising to everyone, as it is to me, heh, but I currently don't have a SUSE installation right now.... I know that's off, and weird, but the reason is that I lost two machines.

Some of you may know that I have multiple Computers, as does my Wife, and for the most part; They're pretty damn old. The only newish machine I have is the one I'm typing this from, which I got for Christmas, and right now for about 400 dollars I could top it easily heh.

Anyway, the reason I don't have SUSE installed right now, is that I used to do this as a set up:

I had my FTP Server, which I still do. I installed another HD in it over a year ago, and it's still going. It's the first Computer I ever bought. A beautiful Pentium 3 working @ 733 MHz, and it came with 128 MBs of RAM, which I upgraded to 384 MBs. The 43 GB HD it came with, I moved as a secondary since it's older and more likely to go on me, so, the new drive I installed is the root partition. That machine's ran literally everything from DOS to BeOS, to Solaris, to Linux of all types and BSD too, and more. Currently, the machine has Slackware 12.0. I haven't upgraded since it works great.

It also has over 300 days of uptime. Which considering the load it has when it gets going, is astounding to me lol.

This machine, was dual booting SUSE and Windows 7, but I had to pop Slackware on for something else. So right now it's dual booting Windows 7 and Slackware. I'm planning on Putting SUSE on though.

My Compaq is running PC-BSD 8.2, and I'm going to probably upgrade to 9.0 since PC-BSD 9.0 is working VERY well on my Laptop. My Celeron based 2.40 GHz machine is dead. It was running SUSE and FreeBSD.

My POS test box, is also dead, and it ran Slackware and BSD. I got my Mom's Celeron D based machine.... The processor blows. It's running FreeBSD 9.0

As for editing X configuration stuff, I personally HIGHLY recommend that you use Yast and do it that way. SUSE has always had a very specific application to configure X and Honestly it works better than most out there. Sax2 will help you :)

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My hardware consist of:
AMD Phenom x4 955

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I hate you lol. I consider myself an Intel guy when it comes to PC Hardware because AMD I'm picky about and very iffy. But one of the VERY few AMD Processors I REALLY like, is the AMD Phenom.... It's one of the ONLY AMD based Processors I have ANY kind of respect for, and, it also happens to be on the even SHORTER list of AMD Processors I'd personally want to use. An AMD Phenom is one of about 2 or 3 AMD Processors I'd pay for. VERY nice!

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4gbs of ddr2 ram
700gb sata hdd
onboard Nvidia Geforce 8200 but registers as 9200??
Nvidia Geforce 8800gt

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Hmmm, have you signed up for any of the SUSE Mailing Lists? They're pretty damn good in terms of getting a problem solved. I know this might seem shocking, but, when even I needed help (God that sounds cocky doesn't it? It's not meant to, but, being that I have been THE SUSE guy here, it might actually shock someone...maybe...lol) Anyway, when I actually ran into something I wasn't sure of, which really didn't happen often (I've been told I have a Unix Halo because I don't seem to ever have the same issues some people do when they start out lol) But anyway, when I did need a hand or even just someone to point me in the direction of WTF was going on, I actually would ask there. Most of the time I was answering questions, but the few times I had to ask them, I actually got an answer.

In fact, one time, it was due to a bug, and, Marcus Meissner, the head of SUSE Security, went into work early for me, and fixed a Kernel patch after getting MY hardware specs, and released it the same day for me. He basically put me as the person discovering a bug in the notes, made sure it would work with MY video card, an re-wrote the ****ing Kernel Patch lol.

Now THAT'S Service lol!

But yea, you'd be surprised how many SUSE Staff Members monitor the mailing lists to make sure everyone gets some kind of help. So yea, if you don't find what you need, eventually, if they can, the SUSE Staff themselves will help you out. Can't say that about too many distros that's for sure lol. Other than the ONE time I had Pat Volkerding answering me because of a Slackware issue. (I had his cell number why not use it right? lol).

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This board uses a Hybrid SLI system, so I dont know if that might mess anything up or not.

BTW. My goal here is to have no reason to dual boot windows.......lol

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The SLI thing, I'm not sure. I've been looking for a job so I can get some cash and put a new machine together, using Nvidia, of course, but I'm not sure if that matters or not Honestly. I think you might need to add a SUSE Mailing List to an Email account for this one man ;) I mean assuming sax doesn't work it out.

Sorry I couldn't help more, but I Hope you get that going soon. I personally have about 5 machines I'm using right now, and out of ALL of those, I have a single Windows partition; I left Windows 7 on this machine, because I'd never used it before, and I actually liked it. So, I left it alone to play games. :)

This PC is actually a HP I picked up off of craigslist. I prefer AMD products, but all I seem to Have is Intel stuff so this one is a first. I too have a crap load of older hardware laying around but I really haven't found a good use for them yet. I set up an old Dell and ran smoothwall on it for a little while but that was it. I havent really thought too much about what to use them for. I'm always open to suggestions though.

I am currently teaching myself Assembly Language and I wanted to use Backtrack but I didn't really want to use it as a primary OS, so I was going to run it in a virtual machine. I would rather Have SUSE be my primary OS and use Backtrack and Windows as guest OSes.

I was going to sign up, but I thought maybe it was a simple fix (which it probably is). I'm going to fiddle a bit more and see if I can come up with a solid solution. SUSE didnt take too long to install so if I screw up I'll just reload the installation. I read somewhere that SaX2 is no longer used in 12.1. I did try SaX3 but for some reason when I click the monitor button it crashes.

If it ain't broke don't fix it. That old hardware seems to run forever when its properly taken care of. I've had less problems with older hardware than some of the new stuff out.

So it was the dvi to vga adapter I was using. Borrowed a dvi cable from another system and all the supported resolutions show up. I knew it had to be something simple...Looks like Linux doesnt like dvi to vga adapters. Man I wonder if that was the problem Solaris was having?

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Originally Posted by chaosclown

So it was the dvi to vga adapter I was using. Borrowed a dvi cable from another system and all the supported resolutions show up. I knew it had to be something simple...Looks like Linux doesnt like dvi to vga adapters. Man I wonder if that was the problem Solaris was having?

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Yes there are a few other distro's that will do the exact if not similiar "Bug" type effects.

I've tried a many of times to get 4 different distro's to work via HDMI so i can setup a PC using our bigg ass LCD TV as the monitor.

usually installtion runs smoothly, come time to eject installtion media & reboot bamm that's when the fun begins.


as Gore mentioned in OpenSuse near everything is editable via Yast2.


Curioius to know once you edited .xorg did the screen resolution reset back to the default after either rebooting or shutting down etc? or did it actually keep your "Custom" settings thereafter?

Well it kept the 1024x768 resolution I gave it the first time, however when I went back to put in a higher resolution, 1600x1050, it still kept the 1024x768. Xorg.conf would report it was set to 1600x1050 but the actually resolution was set at 1024x768. The resolution was set much lower at first, I think 800x600 or 640x400, but once I set it to 1024x768 it did stay even after reboots.

Heh, I knew something had to be going on there; SUSE has great hardware support, and since I know dick about that side of it, I didn't really want to guess and have you basically trying to use my guess as a fix.

So, yea, Kris kinda pointed it out already, but if you have any editing to do, use YAST, it works REALLY well. I kinda wonder why no other versions use that since Novell GPLd it. Red Hat should use it since they kinda suck on that end lol. Actually Slackware could REALLY use it; SUSE stared it's life, as a German version of Slackware, and the reason there is NO 1.0, and the first version is 4.2, is, "42"... ;) (The answer to everything of course lol).

Kris; Don't forget, since you're reading this, you're stopping by on your trip to America.

I was going to sign up, but I thought maybe it was a simple fix (which it probably is). I'm going to fiddle a bit more and see if I can come up with a solid solution. SUSE didnt take too long to install so if I screw up I'll just reload the installation. I read somewhere that SaX2 is no longer used in 12.1. I did try SaX3 but for some reason when I click the monitor button it crashes.

huh?

I take it that he/she is wondering if the latest OpenSuse uses either sax2 or sax3

And something about pushing the power button on there monitor causing the system to kernel panic and crash.

I can't even imagine how a Monitor being turned on or off would crash. That's odd man.

No....There was a button in the program labeled monitor that when I pressed it, the program itself would crash. Not the actual system.

However on a side note. The dvi to vga adapter was not the actual cause of my resolution problems. It was actually a vga extender cable thingy I was using because I had a really short vga cable. I guess it caused the os to think I had a CRT 4:3 monitor and not the actually LCD 16:9. But, sadly I have switched back to windows, atleast for now anyway. SUSE was started to act up a bit. Every now and then everything would lock up but I could still move the mouse. Then when I introduced bluetooth and a wireless usb adapter it would kick off my other usb devices. I love how resource friendly Linux is, especially since I wanted to start running virtual machines. I'll have to sit down and configure SUSE one of these days but for now Windows will have to do. Plus adobes got photoshop cs6 beta available for download

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/photoshopcs6.html

Hey, when this thing froze up, did you load a Terminal or switch to one of the TTYs and see what was going on?

I know SUSE does have some scripts it runs all the time, so it may have very well been the security and log checks that it runs. You can configure it to run them at different times or even shut them off.

When I run SUSE on my Laptop for example, I don't run them because they take too much time up, because it's basically running a Password cracker on the Password file, and then it runs a full security check, and then it starts running **** like checking the system and everything to see what's changed, and then, all of the results of ALL of that get Emailed to root and or an email account you can set up.

You can configure the whole thing in YAST of course, but it's just an idea. I'm just wondering what it was that caused the freeze up, and I remembered that when I used SUSE on one of my Servers, it ran that all the time, and for the while it took, it appeared frozen when in reality it was simple running the scans and checks.

Wow i didnt know it did all that. I didnt even think to do that. I'll have to reinstall and see if that is what was really going on.

Hmm, interesting.

My take is that NVIDIA usually provide the best support for Unix/Linux installations, at least in comparison with ATI/AMD. I have no NVIDIA cards that just won't work, but I do have ATI ones (OK PCI without the "e" :D)

SLI can be a bit strange as this box has NVIDIA graphics management software installed and NVIDIA onboard graphics, but an HD5670 graphics card and drivers. When I cold boot it goes to 1024x768 which is the lowest supported resolution and is a 4:3 aspect ratio, or 1.3333. 16:9 is 1.7777, and 15:9 (old PC widescreen standard) is 1.6666. It goes to 1920x1080 when I restart.

It is a 16:9 22" screen and worked just fine with a GeForce 8500GT card and SLI.

I have no idea what 1600x1050 is (apart from 1.5238:1), but I think that it should be 1600x900, which is obviously 16:9 :D

Apart from possible attachment issues, I would recommend using "standard" settings to begin with.