FreeBSD 4.8 + nvidia

[bAz]

Hi over there,

First, excuse my poor English, I'm Basque.

Second... well as all you can see FreeBSD IT'S A LINUX DISTRO what a surprise!!!

Third, the problem:
I used the nvidia driver with 4.7 -STABLE and it works GREAT, but now I've 4,8 -STABLE and I don't want to go back, but the drivers don't work.

When I write startx it goes right but after showing the nvidia splash when my computer try to show the KDE's starting status (you know, those little icons under a centered box) well my computer just FREEZE.

If anybody has try those drivers with 4.8 -STABLE and has make something to make them work, please respond.

Thank you all.


bAz

PD/ Excuse me... I have a GeForce 3 200 Ti, with 64Mb, an AMD Athlon XP 1600, 640 Mb of RAM, and well, the rest it's no important, I think. I dind't make any hardware changes since I had 4.7.

Thanks a lot again.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by bAz
well as all you can see FreeBSD IT'S A LINUX DISTRO what a surprise!!!

Umm.... WHAT? FreeBSD is not in fact Linux. FreeBSD is one of the three available variants of BSD (the others are NetBSD and OpenBSD), which is Berkeley Unix. The University of California at Berkeley got the Unix source from AT&T way back when, then they made a bunch of changes to it, and released it as BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution, or something like that.

It has zero Linux (and by Linux I mean the kernel) code in it at all. Linux is also much, much newer than BSD (though both are kept current by their maintainers).

Here is a decent explanation of some of the differences, found by searching everyone's friend, Google.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/226.htm

There is also a Newsforge article that focuses more on the different licensing issues, but still has a bit of what you're looking for:

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/10/18/1154216

There's also the FreeBSD+Linux Mini-HOWTO, with a section on what is FreeBSD here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...reeBSD.html#s1

and a section on other information here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...reeBSD.html#s7

[bAz]

When I've posted "well as all you can see FreeBSD IT'S A LINUX DISTRO what a surprise!!!" it was sarcasm, because of how the forum is organized and because of some messages of nvidia's FreeBSD driver.

Excuse me for not to explain it better before, and thanks for your time, trying to explain something that you consider wrong on my post

I just love UN*X and Open Source Projects.

Once it is explained, please don't make of that post a OS war flame... I have a problem, can anybody help me?

Oh, if my words are so "cold", excuse me, but English is not my language.

Thanks again, I hope that somebody can help me.


bAz

[driehuis]

Hi bAz,

I have the same problem you have. My workaround is to start X without a window manager after boot, exit X with control/alt/backspace, and then start X with window manager:

% X
[watch the stippled screen for a few seconds, hit cntl/alt/backspace]
% startx

Depending on how you setup X, you may need to to perform other magic to start up X without window manager.

I have absolutely no idea why this works, but it works for me.

The problem started when I upgraded to FreeBSD 4.8. Downgrading X to 4.2 (from the 4.7 CD) didn't fix the problem, so it seems to be a bad interaction between FreeBSD 4.8 and the nvidia driver.

[bAz]

Hi driehuis,

Thanks for your time and for your solution.

I have question... how can I startx without a window manager? I can't find any archive where the manager appears.

And... well... hope your solution works for me, because I don't know how to restore the nv driver after installing nvidia's one.

Thanks again.


bAz

[Soulburner]

I tried the driver on my FreeBSD 4.8 box, and it didn't lock up like it did with my 5.0 box. The thing is though, I use KDE, and with the nvidia driver, Konsole would always seg fault on exit, where it never did that with the nv driver. I could live with that though, so long as I could play some GL games. So, I installed the tuxracer package to check it out. Never could get it to play, because it would always segfault at start.

So in short, on my setup at least, it works in the sense that it doesn't lock my comp up, but it doesn't work in the sense that I still had no 3d support.

Nvidia had good windows drivers, but I'm going to avoid their BSD drivers like the plague.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by bAz
I have question... how can I startx without a window manager?

Like he said -- just run X (or XFree86; X should be a symlink to XFree86). Then, after looking at the black-and-white background and X-shaped mouse cursor for a bit, hit ctrl-alt-backspace to shut it down.

Then, do a startx like normal.

[bAz]

Thanks again.

I did'nt understud your metod, becouse I thought that I MUST edit any file, sorry

If in "sometime" a new FreeBSD driver doesn't appears I'll try your solution.


bAz

[driehuis]

If you're going to wait for a new release from nVidia, you might be in for a long wait :-) And besides, if _two_ people suggest that you should just try typing

% X

at the command prompt and see what happens, I think it would make sense to just try it!

Oh well, I seem to have solved my problem by using the FreeBSD AGP driver instead of the nVidia AGP driver, as described in the README of the driver:

In /boot/loader.conf:
agp_load="YES"

In XF86Config:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Ti4200"
Driver "nvidia"
VideoRam 131072
Option "NvAgp" "2"
EndSection


This works for me. Of course, I have no explanation for why the nVidia AGP driver worked in FreeBSD 4.7 but fails in 4.8.

[bAz]

Yes, you are right... but what can I do if my system freezes again?

The two times that I try the nvidia driver with FBSD 4.8 I reinstalled it all because I did'nt know how to put my "god-old" nv driver working.

If someone, please, tell me how to reinstall the nv driver I will try the nvidia driver.

Thanks you all for your patient.


bAz

[bwkaz]

Err... change Driver "nvidia" back to Driver "nv"? I believe that's all you have to do -- the nVidia installer doesn't overwrite anything required by the "nv" driver...

[bAz]

Hum... but when I modified my config to run x-11 with the nv driver it doesn't work.

Then I tried to reinstall the x-server but it doesn't work... any idea?

Thanks again.


bAz