HowTo: NViDIA 185.18 Drivers in Ubuntu

[VastOne]

@ Tinivole Great work thank you....

I have 185.18.10 working great under the latest 2.6.28-12-generic kernel.

I have installed both 2.6.29 and the 2.6.30 kernels for testing.

My question is, upon first boot to either kernel I hit the vesa modes looking for the correct nVidia driver. Can I just sudo nvidia-xconfig and use my installed drivers or do I have to run the setup again so that it can compile to these new kernels?

Thanks

[ibuclaw]

@ Tinivole Great work thank you....

I have 185.18.10 working great under the latest 2.6.28-12-generic kernel.

I have installed both 2.6.29 and the 2.6.30 kernels for testing.

My question is, upon first boot to either kernel I hit the vesa modes looking for the correct nVidia driver. Can I just sudo nvidia-xconfig and use my installed drivers or do I have to run the setup again so that it can compile to these new kernels?

Thanks

For each new kernel version - or, more specifically, for each new kernel directory inside /lib/modules that you boot from - you'll need to manually recompile the driver for that specific kernel.

Did you use make-kpkg to build the kernels? If so, ensure the headers are installed, and the symlink:

ls -l /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

Points to the location of the kernel headers.

Then manually compile the NViDIA drivers using the same method as in the guide, and then run:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

that's it. No need to re-setup xorg.conf, unless you've changed back to vesa drivers.

Regards
Iain

[VastOne]

For each new kernel version - or, more specifically, for each new kernel directory inside /lib/modules that you boot from - you'll need to manually recompile the driver for that specific kernel.

Did you use make-kpkg to build the kernels? If so, ensure the headers are installed, and the symlink:

ls -l /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

Points to the location of the kernel headers.


Then manually compile the NViDIA drivers using the same method as in the guide, and then run:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

that's it. No need to re-setup xorg.conf, unless you've changed back to vesa drivers.

Regards
Iain

Regarding the make-kpkg. No I did not. I just dloaded the debs and used gDebi to install them. Is it still possible to get this to work by installing the kernel this way? I am fairly certain the headers are installed...This is my first attempts at kernel installs, if I have to I can start over using the make-kpkg process (after a few hours researching it)

[sharkcohen]

Oh thank goodness, no more dkms, that crap was driving me crazy. Thank you so much for this HowTo!

[gewitty]

I've been trying to solve an NVIDIA driver/monitor problem for several days now. The chronicle of what has been tried so far can be seen on this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...=1#post7168178.

Tinivole has looked in on the discussion once or twice, so will be aware of the problem. Having come to the end of the road as far as solutions are concerned, I'm wondering whether it's worth trying this beta driver. I'm not at all convinced that the problem actually lies with the driver, or with NVIDIA. It seems more likely that something more fundamental is preventing the system from properly acquiring the DDI information from the monitor. However, that statement may be complete nonsense, as I'm outside of my area of competence now.

If someone could give me a steer as to whether this driver is worth trying, I'd be grateful. I just never expected to run into so much trouble with brand new kit. Apparently, it was tested with Vista before it was shipped to me, so I guess any hardware problems would have shown up then?

The problem was that the Nvidia driver was not reading the EDID information being sent by the monitor. This caused it to revert to a basic VESA setup.

The solution was to get a copy of the raw binary EDID file from the manufacturer (Edge10) and force the Nvidia driver to use this by modifying the Xorg.conf file, as per the Nvidia ReadMe (Appendix B) instructions.

This involves adding the following line to the Device section of the Xorg.conf file:

Option "CustomEDID" "DFP:/tmp/edid.bin" (or whatever your filename and path actually are).

This obviously works for pretty much any Nvidia card and any monitor where the EDID information is not being read correctly.

Hope that helps anyone else who's been tearing their hair out with the same problem.

[ibuclaw]

Update
NViDIA have now released their 185.18 drivers as stable.
Altered and renamed the guide to fit.

Happy Ubunting!

[ernstblaauw]

I'm running Jaunty 32-bit on a laptop with a GeForce 7300 GPU. The standard kernels (2.6.28-x) work great, the kernel-team 2.6.29.5 also, but all 2.6.30 kernels I tried (rc4 - final) don't work like it should when I enable desktop effects (the desktop is only updated once every second or so and often, the content of windows are not updated at all). Do you recognize this problem?

I started a thread on the forum of nvnews (link), and I made a ugly video to show the problems and I uploaded this to Youtube (link). Can you help me?

[ibuclaw]

I'm running Jaunty 32-bit on a laptop with a GeForce 7300 GPU. The standard kernels (2.6.28-x) work great, the kernel-team 2.6.29.5 also, but all 2.6.30 kernels I tried (rc4 - final) don't work like it should when I enable desktop effects (the desktop is only updated once every second or so and often, the content of windows are not updated at all). Do you recognize this problem?

I started a thread on the forum of nvnews (link), and I made a ugly video to show the problems and I uploaded this to Youtube (link). Can you help me?

Newer kernels break the NViDIA driver, period.

I am running on 2.6.29.4, so that is my natural recommendation for you to use.

Regards
Iain

[ernstblaauw]

Newer kernels break the NViDIA driver, period.

I am running on 2.6.29.4, so that is my natural recommendation for you to use.

Regards
Iain

Well, I'm also using the latest 2.6.29 kernel. However, it should work on the 2.6.30 kernels according to nvidia on nvnews. And, according to the forums of nvnews, I'm the only one who is experiencing this problem. So maybe I do not suffer from a 'general' issue, but something else.

[ibuclaw]

Well, I'm also using the latest 2.6.29 kernel. However, it should work on the 2.6.30 kernels according to nvidia on nvnews. And, according to the forums of nvnews, I'm the only one who is experiencing this problem. So maybe I do not suffer from a 'general' issue, but something else.

OK, well, fyi, I'm just compiling now.

Linux "2.6.30" (looks to be the official release).
NViDIA "185.18.14" (As mentioned in guide).
Arch "x86_64"

Will get back to you in a couple of hours.

Regards
Iain