Asus A7V266-E/GeForce 2 GTS 32 DDR/Mandrake 9

[cide]

I am by no means a linux newbie, But when it comes to hardware and linux or more specifically XFree86 my knowledge falls very short.

I am running Mandrake 9.0 with a GeForce 2 GTS 32mb on an ASUS A7V266-E with the latest bios Revision.

My mandrake works (or worked) absolutly fine, and VERY smooth up untill I installed the nvidia kernel, then the glx. both from the provided tar files. I made sure XF86config-4 was edited properly with the nvidia line replacing "nv" and adding the glx module.

When I start X I see the nvidia logo, but it chugs and chugs away at the hard drive and eventually gives me a box saying it couldnt start kdmserver, then crashs back to term without any error messages or warnings that I can see.

Term works fine and I can do everything as I could before, so I belive the installation of these new display drivers (both the same version and both source) have caused my system to fail.

I read the readme and tried the Append = "mem=nopentium" in lilo.conf bottom area, which did nothing apparantly.

I've also tried the NvAGP options, no success here. Unless im doing something wrong. This is how I had mine edited:

Option "DPMS"
Option "Nvagp" "0"



Upon installation of mandrake I looked over the hardware logs and it appears that there is no Driver for the VIAKT266 Chipset included with mandrake. It says something along the lines of "UNKNOWN - VIA KT266 Chipset Bridge". I dont know if that is proper or not, I will leave it to the experts.

I am looking for some help, and hopefully I will find that here. I really miss my linux system and I was just about to get EverQuest running via Winex.

If you need any more information that I havnt already posted please say so, and I will get it up here as soon as I can.


Best,

Nigel McLeod.
http://www.fragapalooza.com


Edit: Lastly, Id like to comment on the ease of installion and quality of these drivers ive seen so far. Good job guys!. hopefully we can get this going.

[cide]

Ugh, Shoulda made it a more clear topic

[bwkaz]

kdmserver... hmm...

Did you have it set up to boot into runlevel 5? If so, boot to runlevel 3 once and try to startx from there. Maybe that will work better.

If it does, then one workaround would be permanently booting to runlevel 3...

If you try to manually start kdmserver after booting to runlevel 3 (I believe you'll have to be root to do that, but I'm not positive), does it give any useful error messages in the console you started it from?

[cide]

KDM Server isnt the problem, its just something that wont load. Along with almost everything else when starting X.

My default run level is 3, I cant stand to be booted into X every single time I turn the PC on.

Nothing changes... What happens is just nothing will load once X is started. Everything works fine untill I install the nvidia drivers.

Afterwards, using X is pretty much impossible.. As far as I know its most likly an AGP/Bus/Kernel/Motherboard problem. I dont know why though, I could run everything fine with my ATI Radeon under X. But I switched to Geforce because it has way better Linux support.


No usefull error messages, only notable thing is an (II) Informational message.. Loading GLX Moduel or something.. Shortly after I startx. But that doesnt seem to be a problem either.

[Klaus-P]

VIA chipset support should be compiled in the AGPGART module (or compiled in the kernel). If Mandrake 9.0 distro maker hasn't it included
by default then it might cause the trouble. Well, it's just a thought.

[Bigsky30]

WHile doing some toying and experimentation with the 3123 drivers after compiling and installing the drivers while in X, the HDD goes nuts and the system becomes unusable. This happens before any changes were made to the XF86Config-4 file so the drivers arent in use yet. The problem here is caused my the MesaGL packages being installed and KDE being directed to the wrong libgl.so file... correct me if Im wrong but this seems to be the case since a fresh MDK9 install without the MesaGL packages has no issues at all when compiling and installing the same drivers. Hope this might help!

B

[bwkaz]

Most of the time, if your hard drive is going nuts, it's because the database of which files are where on your system is being updated. Check root's crontab (if you enabled the cron service) by doing a crontab -e as root. If there's a line referencing updatedb or slocate, remove it. Obviously this won't fix the problem when the updatedb or slocate process is running, but check it before the process starts.

cide, is there anything useful in the kernel/klogd ring buffer? Either /var/log/messages or dmesg. Kernel 2.4.19 (if you're using at least that) should have support for the KT266, because that's what it detects my KT333 as. Hmmm... :-/

[cide]

rm /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.* and run ldconfig.


That fixed my problem... Apparantly 8/.


Thanks for all your support, Ill post again shall anything related arise 8)