Nvidia Proprietary Drivers need nvidia-settings to set screen resolution and change other settings. In previous versions of Ubuntu and in other distros to make them permanent (used in every session) you click the “Save to X configuration file”. From Karmic on there is no xorg.conf by default!

As a result, nvidia-settings is not able to save the settings and every time I logged in I had  to change the resolution (Phew!!!). Then Sathya helped me. He gave me a link from Ubuntu Forums. Then I did the following to fix the problem:

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This is the problem that affected me the most in the history of Linux using so far. Image, for two full years i just dint know the solution to this prob is that easy. Too late of me to find out. any ways, better late than never.

So the problem is with FX 5200 Ubuntu liveCD/installation boot will hang mid-way, as to most users, it fills to first three bars and then fails. But the cause is acpi settings create some problem with Ubuntu booting. Nope, “acpi=off” option in Ubuntu boot options does NOT work. Now, that’s what everybody suggests only to know it never helps. Even Sathya suggested to me.

It doesnt work because, BIOS settings dominate at the boot time. The entry makes no sense. SO now does it become clear? You disable ACPI in BIOS!  Wow, that worked like magic for me. Now am running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my PC without any boot problems.

However, shutdown does not work properly. Other things like restart and general stuff work fine.

So try that comment on whether it works.

1. Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” released, but reception hasn’t been spectacular. Poll on Ubuntu forums indicates that ~ 39% of users have had problems they could not fix.
2. Upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to 9.10 Karmic Koala.
3. Installing nVidia drivers (v190.42) in Ubuntu
4. KDE 4.3.3 released, brings in few bug fixes.
5. Experiencing Sabayon 5 //personal note: must try it soon.
6. First GNOME 3.0 development release available.

NVIDIA released their new set of beta drivers yesterday, with a version 180.04. While going through the release notes, I found this line very interesting.

Added initial support for PureVideo-like features on Linux via the new VDPAU AP.

Now I don’t know what exactly they mean by “initial support” but nonetheless its a pretty good that they (finally) decided to add PureVideo support.

In case you’re wondering what PureVideois all about, PureVideo is a decoder which offloads decoding of MPEG2 & H.264 streams over to GPU, leaving the CPU free for other tasks. Read up on PureVideo more on the wiki.

Links to the drivers: x86 / x86-64

Here’s my how-to on installing the drivers.

Do note that the drivers are still BETA.

Many of us may feel screen resolution as the biggest pest in any OS. If we don’t get the screen resolution we want we get real fed up with the UI (dont we?). Personally, I very much hate if screen resolution gets screwed up and also have faced a lot of problems on that.

So I thought I would make a post on the common problems I faced in ubuntu and I hope it would be useful for other distros too.

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Last night NVIDIA quietly uploaded a new Linux display driver to their FTP server. This new driver is tagged 171.05, while the latest public driver has been 169.09. Having already three releases in the 169.xx series, this is a moderate update to 171.xx, but according to NVIDIA it’s not for everyone. There is no official change-log that NVIDIA has published for the 171.05 driver, and the change-log that ships with the driver hasn’t been updated (whether it be intentional or not). The only word that has come out of the NVIDIA camp on this new driver is from Christian Zander and he has said that this driver is only intended for use with the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Systems. The legacy NVIDIA Linux drivers have also been updated this week.
NVIDIA’s Tesla S870 GPU computing system is designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments and has a total of 6GB of dedicated video memory, which is shared by the four 128 processing core GPUs that make up the S870, and is all housed inside a 1U rackmount chassis. NVIDIA’s Tesla was originally introduced in June of last year, but the 171.05 driver is the first Linux release to support the Tesla S870.
So far we noticed one change with the 171.05 driver and that is the introduction of a new NVIDIA utility, nvidia-smi. This utility is for the NVIDIA System Management Interface and provides system-state and diagnostic information. Nvidia-smi will dump this system information either as ASCII text or into an XML log. In addition to the output format, other arguments include -l for creating an infinite loop of nvidia-smi, -t for toggling the LED state, and -i for probing every specified number of seconds. According to the man page and the –help output, nvidia-smi is only designed for the NVIDIA Tesla S870. However, nvidia-smi had run with a GeForce 8 graphics card installed but with little information. Likewise, the 171.05 driver during our initial tests had worked just fine when using it in a non-Tesla environment.
You can try out this driver by heading on over to the NVIDIA FTP server.

Source: Phoronix

Technorati Tags: Linux, NVIDIA, Drivers

NVIDIA has released a new Linux display driver, which is a stable version of their previous 169.04 beta last month. In addition, the new NVIDIA 169.07 Linux driver has a few changes, while most of the release highlights were already found in the 169.04 release. We are preparing additional Linux tests with this new driver, but for right now we have the details on this proprietary display driver.

The NVIDIA 169.04 beta driver had introduced GeForce 8800GT support a month ago, while in this 169.07 driver the support is officially there as well as for the GeForce 8800GTS 512MB and GeForce 8800M. Another feature originally introduced in 169.04 was improved mode-setting support on Quadro and GeForce 8 graphics cards and addressing some stability concerns (including for SMP users). This driver also has some performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series.

The 169.07 drivers fixes some XRender issues. Another new fix in 169.07 is fix for scrolling ARGB X drawables in Qt and improved interlaced DVI, HDMI, and HDTV mode-setting.

For those using the NVIDIA proprietary driver for workstation purposes, the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) driver is now included with the executable file.

Aside from the mentioned changes, there doesn’t appear to be anything else new in the NVIDIA 169.07 driver. The x86 release notes and download link can be found from the NVIDIA’s website.

In my previous post, I’d explained on how to install Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu Fiesty. This post will outline the simple steps for installing Compiz Fusion on openSUSE 10.3. This article is written from an nVidia user’s point of view.

First, you’ll have to download nVidia’s drivers. You can get it, via the 1-click install(for Legacy cards, click here). I’d recommend downloading the latest drivers from nvidia’s site and doing a manual install of the drivers.

Manual install of nVidia drivers

Pre-requisites:

• compiler gcc,
• program make and
• package kernel-source

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Phoronix reports that NVIDIA’s 169.04 driver brings out a lot of improvements over its predecessor. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. 

What Phoronix had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

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NVIDIA has released new BETA drivers for x86 and x64 (AMD64/EM64T). This new driver is now off of their latest 169 code line and will possibly net some performance benefit on top of the long release highlights list:

• Added support for GeForce 8800 GT.
• Improved modesetting support on Quadro/GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 8 series GPUs.
• Fixed stability problems with some GeForce 6200/7200/7300 GPUs multi-core/SMP systems.
• Improved hotkey switching support for some Lenovo notebooks.

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