8.10 Intrepid Ibex Nvidia legacy GeForce 2 MX 400

[eduardoska]

I don't know if this has been posted before, but with the new release of the Intrepid Ibex, i found my graphic chipset only worked with the nv driver upgrade from the installation.

I found the way to make it work my chipset with full 3d using the beta driver from nvidia.What i did and worked for me is

1. Downloaded the beta driver from nvidia here the 96.43.09 legacy BETA here ( I Used the Nvidia driver 0.run)

2. Downloaded from synaptic manager linux-headers-generic and linux-source-2.6.27

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic linux-source-2.6.27

3. CTRL + ALT F1

4.

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

5.

sudo sh NVIDIA DRIVER that you downloaded from the url above

6

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

and done!

That worked for me

[jdmarshall]

I too, have difficulties with Intrepid, and a GeForce MX460. I will try your proposed fix method this evening.

Thankyou for posting,



Regards,
John

[deroby]

Trying this on a DELL Inspiron 8200 with GeForce4 Go card... fingers crossed... (I took the pkg1.run file though).

Things seem to go well, it needs to recompile a lot of stuff, but there is progress...

Auto-Config ran fine too

NVIDIA package finished without any errors, but when restarting the gdm I'm presented with a black screen.

Using shutdown -now to restart the machine from the console...

(machine seems to hang on the 'going down' screen... waited a while, but in the end simply "pulled the plug")

Machine is rebooting now... but somewhere along the line the progressbar switches to text-mode and shows nvidia [Fail] in the list of err, modules being started.

It then seems to jump back to GUI mode, I hear the 'drums' that I associate with the login screen, however, the screen remains black. I seem to remember having had this with a RIVA TNT laptop on 7.10 too when installing from scratch, so I'll have to search for that one again =( Maybe I should try to hook up an external screen ? Oh well, out of time now, will try to continue on this again sometime later...

Hope this helps / warns anyone else out there with the same setup... (ps : when I come to think of it, maybe I should have removed all other nvidia related packages before I ran that beta NVIDIA*pkg1.run thingie ?)

edit : did sudo apt-get remove nvidia* to get rid of all the nvidia related packages, rebooted and now am kind of stuck with an X-server that complains its unable to start anything, and a gdm stop command that is (apparently) ignored as the NVIDIA package keeps complaining that there is an X-server running... =(
Got around that one by using ctrl-backspace before running the NVIDIA thing

Anyway, reran the NVIDIA package, lots of recompiles again etc, bit of complaining about modified configuration files, but in the end I'm still stuck with a black screen.

[eduardoska]

I chose the pkg0.run package and it worked like a charm

And wich Geforce 4 Go card do you have?? The ones supported by this drivers are the next ones:

GeForce4 440 Go 0x0174
GeForce4 420 Go 0x0175
GeForce4 420 Go 32M 0x0176
GeForce4 460 Go 0x0177
GeForce4 440 Go 64M 0x0179

If you indeed have one of those cards, then remember, this drivers are still in beta and they're not in full release yet.

[eduardoska]

Or maybe you can try with this another legacy beta driver, GeForce4 Go chipset it's supported too by this one

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

[eduardoska]

Or maybe you can try with this another legacy beta driver, GeForce4 Go chipset it's supported too by this one

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122140

[lolcese]

Worked perfectly, thanks !

[deroby]

I THINK it's a GeForce4 440 Go so it _should_ be supported, it has 64Mb ram so it might be the 64M version ?. I know things are still beta, so you won't hear me complain... just trying out things on my 'toy-laptop'.

I downloaded the pkg0.run using wget <url> (CLI power! =) and ran that one... rebooting as we speak...

No errors, but still black screen...think I'll need to go look that one up in another thread, pretty sure I've had something similar long ago... I'm pretty sure the screen is there, but the back lightning isn't on, hence it doesn't work very comfortable =/

Playing around a bit I decided to hook up an external screen, it immediately complained about an unsupported input : refresh rates H:06kHZ, V:85Hz

Thinking there might be a similar problem with the laptops own display, I went into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file using emacs and threw out the resolutions 1600x1200 and 1280x<something> although the first one is the actual native resolution of the screen. After saving I (ctrl-c/ctrl-x, took me ages to find, newbie here) I wanted to restart gdm, but somehow messed up and started a second x-server !? And that one worked nicely, shows an nvidia logo during startup, but I can live with that =)

Rebooting AGAIN as we speak, hoping that I will now be able to log into the 'default' GUI (alt-F7), fingers crossed.

Once this works, it will become an issue of finding out how to get the resolution back up again, 1024x768 is a little too low imho.

GRRRR, black screen again =(

And now it even fails all over the place when I try to start gdm =( Oh well, at least I tasted the power of a decent driver for a couple of (precious) seconds =)

Looking around I found nvidia-installer --update ... trying that one now, it downloads a completely different package !?! (177.80)

Funny, once downloaded it comes telling me that the GPU found (Geforce4 440 Go) is supported through 96.43.xx and will be ignored by this package =) Oh well ...

[stinger30au]

thanks for the info i will try it today

if you want to see what video card uses what drivers, this post may help you


http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=970237

[deroby]

another update (hope I don't bore you guys to death =)

Found out how to get multiple x-sessions running (simply starting them using /etc/init.d/gdm --? which somehow errors into thinking I want a new one open ?!?

Anyway, that opens up a new one nicely (alt-F8) and running glxgears gives me 1600+ fps, so I guess that I'm no longer running in software mode there =) Setting the appearance to non-basic gives me the wobly-windows, however, it causes text-screens (eg. Terminal) to show up as an empty white canvas =(

Need to get on doing other stuff the next days, but will see if there is an update by then and if the problem persists will try to report it to nvnews. I'm sure we're on the right track here, probably some simple configuration that's wrong, but I'm afraid I'm way too newby to find it on my own =(

Regardless, I think ubuntu is quite an achievement !