Nvidia Riva TNT/TNT2 can i get it working on 9.10 Karmic

[zonemikel]

I'm setting up this computer for my cousin, she is a little girl who likes snes games and stuff. Anyway the machine has a built in riva tnt card, its running at 1ghz with like 512mb of ram.

The driver i found on nvidias website was 71.86 thats the one that supports "legacy" cards. When i try to install the new driver it just says it will ignore the legacy gpu and that i should use the 71.86 drivers.

There is no option in the "restricted drivers" part of ubuntu so i can download and run NVIDIA-Linux-x86-71.86.11.pkg1.run (http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/71.86.11/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-71.86.11-pkg1.run)

I can install the 71.86 driver but it does not update the xorg.conf, so after reading the /usr/doc/share/nvidiasomething/readme i setup the xorg.conf; however, as soon as i change the driver to nvidia instead of nv or visa it crashes, says something about it cant load nvidia_drv.so in a location on the disk. I have navigated to that location and i do see nvidia_drv.so there so i'm not sure why it cant load it.

I'm just trying to get zsnes to run a little smother for her its really jumpy now. I love linux but it seems time and time again i'm running into these driver problems. I'm tempted to throw microXP on it (10min install) and then i could load the drivers for the card and things would run better.

[zonemikel]

Looking at this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia i tried to install linux-restricted-modules-XXX for 2.6.31-17-generic but they dont seem to exisit.

Also looking for the nvidia drivers in synaptic package manager yeilds only the newer drivers.

However if i search for the restricted modules or the nvidia driver in 9.04 with 2.6.28-17-generic i find both linux-restricted-modules-2.6.28-17-generic and nvidia-71-kernel-source, nvidia-glx-71.

So can i conclude that i cannot install the legacy drivers for 9.10 but if i downgraded to 9.04 i could ?

[LuisGMarine]

First of all did you try using the Hardware Drivers?

If you go to System > Administration > Hardware Drivers, and open that up are there any drivers for you to activate? Hopefully you *should* see one for the video card. If you dont, then open up a terminal and type this command in.


sudo lshw -C video

...and we'll take it from there.

[zonemikel]

Ya that whole "hardware drivers" thing has nothing thats why i was trying to install linux-restricted-modules. And even in synaptic package manager the 71. (legacy) driver does not show up for my kernel.

anyway im gonna pop in another hdd and install 9.04 see if that changes anything.


*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: NV5 [RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro]
vendor: nVidia Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 15
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: pm agp agp-2.0 bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nvidia latency=64 maxlatency=1 mingnt=5
resources: irq:18 memory:41000000-41ffffff memory:44000000-45ffffff(prefetchable) memory:42000000-4200ffff(prefetchable)

[5010]

I am using 9.04 and have the same issue.
I also loaded the nvidia legacy stuff from synaptic.
System>Admin>Nvidia X Server Settings says "You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver. Please edit your X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and restart the X server. "
nvidia-xconfig doesn't exist
so I followed advice from nvidia from here:
http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8756/README/chapter-03-section-02.html
I added driver "nvidia" to the xorg.conf device section.
man xorg.conf said the load "glx" was automatic so I didn't put that in.

Here is the error in the Xorg.0.log:

(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so: undefined symbol: AllocateScreenPrivateIndex
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (loader failed, 7)
(EE) No drivers available.

So... how does one define such a symbol?

[PARO]

I got the same problem with the same card and newest drivers from nvidia.com
It'd be nice if someone knows how to fix this.

[real.aussie]

Hi,
I read this on http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html#13

13. Support for very old legacy chipsets (GeForce2 and older)

nVidia dropped support for very old legacy chipsets with release 1.0-7664.
Currently these are the following:

NVIDIA chip name Device PCI ID
------------------------------- -------------------------------
RIVA TNT 0x0020
RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro 0x0028
RIVA TNT2 Ultra 0x0029
Vanta/Vanta LT 0x002C
RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro 0x002D
Aladdin TNT2 0x00A0
GeForce 256 0x0100
GeForce DDR 0x0101
Quadro 0x0103
GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro 0x0150
GeForce2 Ti 0x0151
GeForce2 Ultra 0x0152
Quadro2 Pro 0x0153

If you're affected by this use release 71.86.01.
Then in the following section 14 they tell you where to get the binaries:

14. References

* nVidia driver website
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_180.22.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_173.14.12.html (legacy chipsets)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_96.43.01.html (old legacy chipsets)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_71.86.01.html (very old legacy chipsets)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_180.22.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_173.14.12.html (legacy chipsets)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_96.43.01.html (old legacy chipsets)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_amd64_71.86.01.html (very old legacy chipsets)

* nvidia installer
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.22/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.22-pkg1.run
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/173.14.12/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.12-pkg1.run (legacy chipsets)
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/96.43.01/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.01-pkg1.run (old legacy chipsets)
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/71.86.01/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-71.86.01-pkg1.run (very old legacy chipsets)
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/180.22/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.22-pkg2.run
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/173.14.12/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.14.12-pkg2.run (legacy chipsets)
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.01/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-96.43.01-pkg2.run (old legacy chipsets)
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/71.86.01/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-71.86.01-pkg2.run (very old legacy chipsets)
Hope this has been of help.

[PARO]

Thanks for pointing me to SUSE, they do suppot this card via RPM packages too! Only i cant get openSUSE to install on this computer. During installation the kernal panicks everytime no matter what settings i start the install with (text, addswap, etc.). I tried the net install, livecd, and soad. Puppy also supports it.. but Puppy on a computer that will have multiple users who will require lots of different software options doesn't seem to work for me (Upup /w Ubuntu sources the driver fails in). Ubuntu now has packages for all the new drivers except the 71 set, which we need o_o.