Very slow X startup
 

I recently installed the NVIDIA Linux drivers on a Red Hat 7.3 system with a PII 450 Mhz and a RIVA TNT 16 MB, and they work fine, except for one problem. The X server startup is incredibly slow when I log out to when gdm is and when I boot my computer to the gdm display. Before it only took 1 or 2 seconds to start up, but now it's taking 30 seconds to a minute each time. I know my computer is slow, but I'm not sure that it would be that much of a performance difference. I've tried Option "NoLogo" "true" but it doesn't seem to help. I would very much appreciate anyone who can help with this problem. Thanks in advance.

I'm having same kind of problems. When I used nvidia driver that was supplied with X-Free there was no delay. The problem seems to get worse with every new driver release from nvidia. The version I used before this latest 2960 only had a delay of about 10 seconds which was bearable. Now with 2960 the delay is close to a minute and this is getting very annoying. Unfortunately I don't have older driverset anymore and nvidia doesn't seem to provide it on their downloadpage either.

My card is an old TNT (Diamond Viper V550). So: For the lack of better solution, if anyone has older drivers left (I believe the version I used before was something like 2513?), please do us old TNT owners a great big favor and make them available :)

-Vazi-

Each driver from NVIDIA has gotten a little larger. How much ram do your systems have?

the openGL screen hacks run ok?

I've got 128 MB of RAM.

What OpenGL hacks are you referring to?

Make sure you can ping your hostname.

I have 320 MB memory and OpenGL works just fine. Pinging also works.

screen hacks ( screensavers , sorry )

nothing in the log files? Is there a lot of disk activity durring this waiting time?

I'm having the same problem on my Slack 8.1 box (512 meg memory & TNT Riva2 - 16 meg video card). I've checked the /var/log and there don't seem to be any warning or error messages. glxgears runs very slow! I checked my symlinks and everything seems to run o.k. On my old HD I have Slack 8.0 with about a year old NVidia driver that runs like a champ. I'll investigate further and see what I come up with.

I have the same problem with gears and the other opengl screen hacks .. I have not been able to figure it out yet.

Did you read through the XFree log?? anything there ... can you open up a shell durring the X start and watch top to see if anything is spiking?

Nothing special on logs and there is no disk activity at all during this delay. Switching to another vt is not possible since the macnihe seems to be completely jammed during X startup, so no top :(

Some people on other threads on this group are telling that their machine does a lot of mode switching when they start X. I think this might also be the case in at least my situation. I'm not sure though, my screen doesn't really make any visible "effects" when changing modes.

Well umh, you can always try to turn off 'AGP Turbo Mode' in BIOS.

It helped me when my graphics were all slow and/or jammed.

can you ssh in from another machine and watch top .... are you doing a startx from runlevel 3 or a switch to runlevel 5 ?