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tjc
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Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 8:43 am |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Does anybody know off the top of their head if the nvidia-173xx drivers ever made it into the main repository?
I was experimenting with the live CD while preparing to upgrade the production box yesterday and as far as I could tell pacman could only find nvidia (which is 190.x.x and doesn't support 4 and 5 series chips) and nvidia-96xx (which won't do HD resolutions for me). A bit of searching on bugs found something about nvidia-173xx (which works well for me in R5.5), but I couldn't tell if it ever went beyond the core-testing repo.
I was really hoping to finally upgrade to R6 over the long weekend (so far I've only had to work 16 hours writing detailed designs!) but not having a good video driver is a big stumbling block.
BTW - being able to run from the live CD and upgrade/install packages from the repository without having to install to HD is a huge win. It lets you monkey around and do all sorts of crazy experiments, then just pop the CD and reboot to get back to a working system.
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jzigmyth
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Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2010 7:25 am |
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Joined: Thu Mar 02, 2006 5:42 pm
Posts: 410
Location:
middleton wi usa atsc
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Hi tjc,
I'm running a stock R6.03 with an AGP FX5200. I'm driving my TV with with a DVI to HDMI adapter and running the TV at 1080p with (I believe your) xorg.conf option line:
Option "ModeValidation" "AllowNon60HzDFPModes, NoMaxPClkCheck, NoEdidMaxPClkCheck, NoMaxSizeCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoWidthAlignmentCheck, NoDFPNativeResolutionCheck, NoVirtualSizeCheck"
The nvidia driver is ver 96.43.16 (stock install) and it does HD just fine for me. What are your symptoms?
zig
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tjc
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Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 11:35 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Kind of like the failures discussed here among others. http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20698
On the occasions where it sort of works it won't do more than 1024x768 because of mode validation failures, and more often only 800x600. When I try to tweak the xorg.conf to get around the validation stupidity, it tends to lock up requiring me to use the reset button to regain control and not leaving anything useful in the log files.
I've made repeated attempts to upgrade and always end up running into some silly issue that forces me to give up roll back after wasting 2 to 8 hours fiddling around with the box. With my current job there never seem to be enough hours in the day or days in the week so those failed attempts represent major investments of time.
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jzigmyth
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Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 6:59 am |
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Joined: Thu Mar 02, 2006 5:42 pm
Posts: 410
Location:
middleton wi usa atsc
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I was just thinking that maybe you have some sort of odd hardware configuration that the old driver can't handle but the new driver can, like maybe interrupt sharing or something like that.
I think that on some motherboards the AGP slot shares an interrupt with the PCI slot right next to it.
It's a bit of a long shot, but if you have a card in the slot right next to the AGP slot, maybe try moving it and freeing up that slot and seeing if the old driver is any happier.
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tjc
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Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 8:11 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Actually retried the upgrade over the weekend, and it looks like the nvidia-173xx drivers got added to the core repo. I had nvidia-96xx limping along for a while but it took a bunch of deep zen fiddling with the xorg.conf and a certain amount of luck.
I ended up making an image backup, tearing the machine apart, replacing the two 250Gb PATA HDs with a new 640Gb SATA HD, moving components around to optimize airflow, rerouting various wires and cables, ... (didn't actually tear the motherboard out and replace the chipset HSF, but set things up for easy access to do that), and doing a bunch of dusting and vacuuming.
Then I did a scratch install of 6.03, copied over the media files from the image backup, extracted the recording meta data from the old DB backup, made some adjustments to the column names, and applied that to the new DB.
After a some other fiddling around and the machine seems to be at about 90%. The main outstanding annoyance is that the FE doesn't want to switch resolutions for different size recordings...
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