NVidia accelerated drivers frustration

[Arkaein]

I've been having some real problems getting NVidia's accelerated drivers to work for my Asus GeForce FX 5700 card.

I've tried several approaches, mainly using the NVidia installer (a couple different versions, right now 5328 is installed). Ive also tried the Kano script but it could never connect to the NVidia ftp site to actually download it's own copy of the installer.

I've been over the NVidia driver readme several times and it seems like I've checked over just about everything. I made sure to use gcc-2.95 when installing the driver. All of the .so, .a and .o files are installed in the correct places and have the correct symlinks. I've edited the base XF86Config-4 script that Knoppix 3.3 installs to remove glcore and dri, and replaced vesa with nvidia (glx is already there). The char-195 (or whatever) aliases are in the right places.

About the only thing I haven't played around with is the AGP settings, though the README for the latest drivers says that by default both AGPGART and NVidia's are attempted, with AGPGART tried first, so I figure this probably isn't the issue, though I'll try it out.

When I try to boot my machine with the NVidia driver XF86Config-4 file (I have a copy of the file modified for each driver I've tried) the screen simply goes black as X is started, though the monitor seems to still be getting a signal. The keyboard seems to lock up after about a half-dozen keypresses as evidenced by whether I can toggle Num Lock (even pressing Num Lock enough times locks things up). Trying to Alt-F1 or Ctrl-Alt-F1 or any other terminal does nothing. The XFree log files are not very useful, they seem to stop at somewhat arbitrary points, likely varying with how much of the output buffer was flushed before things locked up. The parts of log files I have looked at never report errors regarding anything critical, just a few empty font paths.

A few other oddities. I haven't tried as much but can't get the nv drivers to work either, although with these X only fails to start but does not lockup (I think). This made me think of possible bad hardware, but everything runs flawlessly in VESA mode that this seems unlikely. The other thing relates to thread-local storage support. When I was checking to make sure everything was in the right place I found that TLS is supported in my glibc and I had the TLS libraries installed, but in /usr/lib/tls.COPY instead of /usr/lib/tls. Because my system had no tls directory I just copied the directory over to the expected location, though this didn't appear to solve anything.

I'm kinda at my wits ends here, having worked at this on and off for about 2 weeks. Any advice anyone can give, I'd be very grateful.

[towjamb]

Hi,
Not sure about the latest driver but I know that Kano's 4496 script for hdd-install works as I used it for my FX 5600:
http://www.kano.mipooh.net/install-n...4496-debian.sh
Maybe the 5328 script URL is incorrect. Try sending an email to Kano:
realKano AT directbox DOT com
Cheers.

Rick

[Arkaein]

Thanks, I'll give the 4496 script a try after giving the 5328 another chance, as well as the 4620 script.

Hope this works, I'll be posting results in the next few hours.

[Arkaein]

Success!

The 5328 script does appear to be broken, but Kano's 4620 script worked like a charm. For all the things I've tried, it's hard to believe I only tried the one Kano script that was broken.

Thanks for the advice towjamb, and I'll send that e-mail off to Kano to hopefully get the script bug fixed.