KDE and kde apps dont work with Nvidia Drivers, Gnome Does..???

[zarathustra674]

Hey everyone, Ive been having a hard time using the Nvidia drivers with any Kde apps, and the Kde desktop environment. All Gnome stuff works fine, but when i run Kppp or even try to load the KDE, my system freezes, the screen messes up ect. sometimes with Kppp it wont be a permanent lockup, but when I look at the processes, Kppp tries to use a ton of ram 500+MB and the HD keeps reading and reading.. I dont know what to do for this thing, any advice would be appreciated. Like I said I have no trouble with Gnome or any Gnome apps. I dont get it.. Excuse me if theres something Ive missed. Oh yeah, KDE works fine with a fresh install and the stock nv driver. please help.. this is driving me nuts.. I had the same problem with the version 3.??? drivers as well..

[volt]

System specs?
What distribution are you using?
Have you tried older drivers? 2960 and 3123?

[3777]

He must be installing the rpm's, when I did that kde wouldn't open for me, but Gnome was fine. When I installed them via Source / Tar.gz everything was fine.....

[zarathustra674]

I running the new drivers version 4.?? and yeah I installed via tar.gz, and still got the problem. I editied my xf86config-4 file to change the driver name, and those other things. But still no kde or kde apps. Then I included only the font directories i had(removing the unix thing), and then installed some kde libraries, and added alias char-major-195 nvidia to the modules.conf. One or all of the latter must have fixed the problem because i can run KDE now and the kde apps. However, i noticed that when i look at the services running, X is using like 250mb or so.. This seems like way too much to me.. I dont know whats going on here.. So any suggestions on that end would be helpful. ALso i noticed that i can run tux racer fine, but when i try the gears screensaver I cant rotate the gears like i could before.. These are minor inconvienences in my opinion, because i can at least run the other things. Im gonna include some config files for you to look at.

System is
pIII 733
Geforce2 gts
40gb 7200rpm drive
mandrake 9 and xp til i remove it in a few minutes..
also rieser filesytem on the linux partition since i hate those slow startups on improper shutdowns.. I will post the log file shortly i cant think of the name of it right off hand, that tells you what went on during startup, it has some errors in it about the monitor frequencies..

Oh and dare i say... I know this will open up a world of feedback.. compaq 5900t computer, that has compaq bios, via mobo. Its not that bad really and i got a good deal on it all a couple of years ago.

yeah im a little mouthy..:D

anyway im gonna install straight linux now on the entire drive just because it'll force me to learn a diff os.

thanks for replying..



# ************************************************** ********************
# Refer to the XF86Config man page for details about the format of
# this file.
# ************************************************** ********************

Section "Files"
# Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together)
# By default, Mandrake 6.0 and later now use a font server independent of
# the X server to render fonts.
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/mdk"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
#DontZap # disable <Crtl><Alt><BS> (server abort)
AllowMouseOpenFail # allows the server to start up even if the mouse doesn't work
#DontZoom # disable <Crtl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching)
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe" # Double-Buffering Extension
Load "v4l" # Video for Linux
SubSection "extmod"
#Option "omit xfree86-dga"
EndSubSection
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx" # 3D layer
# Load "/usr/X11R6/modules/extensions/libglx.so"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "Keyboard"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XkbOptions" ""
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "MouseManPlusPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "monitor1"
VendorName "Plug'n Play"
HorizSync 30-70
VertRefresh 50-100

# Sony Vaio C1(X,XS,VE,VN)?
# 1024x480 @ 85.6 Hz, 48 kHz hsync
ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync

# TV fullscreen mode or DVD fullscreen output.
# 768x576 @ 79 Hz, 50 kHz hsync
ModeLine "768x576" 50.00 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630

# 768x576 @ 100 Hz, 61.6 kHz hsync
ModeLine "768x576" 63.07 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce2 DDR (generic)"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "DPMS" "on"
Option "NvAGP" "2"
#Option "CursorShadow" "true"
#Option "CursorShadowAlpha" "76"
#Option "CursorShadowXOffset" "2"
#Option "CursorShadowYOffset" "1"
#Option "Pageflip" "on"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen1"
Device "device1"
Monitor "monitor1"
DefaultColorDepth 24

Subsection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

Subsection "Display"
Depth 15
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "layout1"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
Screen "screen1"
EndSection

modules.conf

probeall scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
above snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-slot-0 snd-emu10k1
probeall usb-interface usb-uhci
alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
alias /dev/ttySHCF[0-9]* hcfpciserial
alias char-major-240 hcfpciserial
alias /dev/cuaHCF[0-9]* hcfpciserial
alias char-major-241 hcfpciserial
alias /dev/modem hcfpciserial
options hcfpciserial serialmajor=240 calloutmajor=241 pcivendorid=0x14F1 pcideviceid=0x1033
alias /dev/nvidia* nvidia
alias char-major-195 nvidia

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by zarathustra674
However, i noticed that when i look at the services running, X is using like 250mb or so.. It's been that way ever since I remember, with XFree86 4.0.2 and the 0.9-769 nVidia drivers (Mandrake 7.2 and whatever kernel came with that). X's VSZ column in the output of ps aux has always been huge (as a matter of fact, it's over 300MB right now on my system, with 3123 and X 4.2.0 from source), but the RSS column, the Resident Set Size, is what's more important, since it's the actual amount of real memory in use (at least, that's the way I read the ps man page...). That, on my system, is like 20MB for X.

I wonder... does changing over to the "nv" driver make X smaller? I don't think it should (and I can't test it, as I have a GF4 Ti), but it would be interesting to see what happened. The nVidia X drivers (the stuff in NVIDIA_GLX) aren't all that large, maybe 1MB for nvidia_drv.o and libglx.so.1.0.3123, combined, then libGLcore.so is only 3 megs, so that alone wouldn't cause it...

[zarathustra674]

Well, I finally made the leap to pure Linux (No ms no xp or 98).. That may change in a week or two. I read somewhere that you have to be a sado-maschoist(sp?) to use it, and Im beginning to think its true. Anyway, After I repartitioned the drive and did another install, I played hell trying to get things going again. I copied my Config-4 and module.confg, files back into the new system, and got the lockups anyway. I tried depmod -ae, (i have no idea what that does exactly i never took enough time to read the entire reference page). What I did do again, and as previously mentioned was to install all the KDE librairies, and this is what got kde and friends up and running again. I did run the monitoring tool, gnome system monitor or something (before installing the drivers) and it reported X as using 60 MB total. Now its like 280MB and keeps climbing. Yeah the RSS is around 29MB right now, but still Id like to know whats up with the total memory usage.. I only have 256MB ram, but i set up 768 for the swap. Looks like i might have to get some more ram.. :mad: If you happen across something to fix this let me know. I'll certainly do the same..

[Andy Mecham]

VSZ is a misleading number - you're seeing stuff like AGP memory, etc.

--andy

[Kayosiii]

I found the difficulties went away when I disabled "RenderAccel" Which is a pain though because it slows down 2D performance....
I would really like a better solution to this.

I suspect this has to do with the fonts... (gut intuition more than anything else)... Try turning off font antialiasing. (still not the ideal solution but this will help isolate the problem).

Finally Don't worry about the memory usage....

Most of this is in buffers that are not actually being used -- I have 756 megs of ram in my system all of which appears to being used. I can open just about as many files and programs as I like and I never have to use the swap file.

The KDE monitoring program shows a clearer picture than the GNOME one.

[sanat]

modules.conf

probeall scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
above snd-emu10k1 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-slot-0 snd-emu10k1
probeall usb-interface usb-uhci
alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
alias /dev/ttySHCF[0-9]* hcfpciserial
alias char-major-240 hcfpciserial
alias /dev/cuaHCF[0-9]* hcfpciserial
alias char-major-241 hcfpciserial
alias /dev/modem hcfpciserial
options hcfpciserial serialmajor=240 calloutmajor=241 pcivendorid=0x14F1 pcideviceid=0x1033
alias /dev/nvidia* nvidia
alias char-major-195 nvidia

Mine says alias char-major-195 NVdriver

Big difference!

[sanat]

Oops! That's assuming you're using the older driver.

Also, KDE loads glx, even though it may not be using it. You may want to see if you're using the nvidia glx library and not the stock XFree86 one.

[Kayosiii]

How does one test this....

[zarathustra674]

Thanks again to all who're replied and offered suggestions. Right now, All is almost well. My log file says glx is getting loaded with just plain old Load "glx" but when i run the gears demo, they turn really slow, and i can no longer rotate em with my mouse. I can play the tux racer fine.Seems like at one point in the past i could do this, perhaps it was with the 3123 drivers. I dont think that upgrading the driver would cause a performance hit, but who knows. Does anyone know how i can fix the warnings in the monitor section of the log file or where i can make adjustments? Ive got a ton of documentation to read but i havent got around to it yet. Guess I'm gonna toy around with this thing a little more.. Im gonna put

alias char-major-195 nvidia
options nvidia NVreg_ReqAGPRate=4

according to the Nvidia documentation you can use this to force 2x or 1x agp, im gonna try and force 4x if it'll work like that, does anyone know what exactly the alias line does?? Im also gonna try using NVagp in the XF86Config-4 file to use NVAGP instead of AGPGART

[zarathustra674]

When i try to run the gears program i get an error that reads "could not open dev/nvidiact1 because the permissions are too restrictive" what does this mean if anyone knows.. also do i need this file "libc.so.6" because i cant find it anywhere. the nvidia read me in the usr/share/doc/nvidiaGLX directory says it should appear as output when you do this "ldd /usr/X11R6/bin/gears" when i do that however i dont see that file anywhere and some of my files are not pointing to the directories that nvidia lists them as, mine point to what appears to be the same files but in the X11R6 directory instead of the lib directory.. This, I dont think should make any difference... And i can still play tux just fine.. Perhaps i should try to download a real game to test this thing.. like perhaps ut2003 or quake III

[zarathustra674]

included is the output "ldd /usr/X11R6/bin/gears" gives me.