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View Full Version : [ubuntu] OpenGL apps crash X after upgrade using nvidia proprietary driver



John Harrington
April 30th, 2008, 05:01 AM
After upgrade to Hardy, my X session crashes instantly when I run glxgears or tux racer (a 3-D game), or when I select anything other than "none" under System > Preferences > Visual Effects. I didn't have any such problem under Gutsy. The proprietary Nvidia accelerated graphics driver is enabled and appears to be loaded properly.

My video controller is a VGA-compatible Nvidia NV18 (GEForce4 MX 4000)
My processor is an AMD Sempron 3000+

My xorg-conf file was generated by nvidia-xconfig. I ran nvidia-xconfig again after upgrading.

Nvidia xserver settings show the following OpenGL information:
Direct rendering: No
Renderer: GeForce4 MX 4000/AGP/SSE2/3DNOW!
Version: 1.5.8 NVIDIA 96.43.05

I have no idea what to do to fix this problem and would be grateful for any advice.

John Harrington
May 1st, 2008, 04:30 AM
I've been working on this but made no progress, and still need help.

When glxgears crashed x, I had this message in syslog:


Apr 30 00:09:01 kitchencomp gdm[5160]: WARNING: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

I found a thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=671261 in which a similar problem was solved by removing /usr/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx and replacing it with a symlink to libglx.so.xxx.xx.xx file in the same directory. Mine, however, was already a symlink.

I noticed that when I was starting nvidia-settings in a terminal and clicking "OpenGL/GLX information," I was getting the error message: "could not open the device file /dev/nvidiactl (Permission denied)." If I started nvidia-settings with sudo, I didn't get the error message, and Direct Rendering was reported as "Yes." Glxgears also worked with sudo. That led me to
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=540459 in which a similar problem was solved temporarily by changing the permissions on /dev/nvidiactl and /dev/nvidia0, and permanently by editing /etc/devfs/conf.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc Neither of these worked for me. Another forum suggested solving the same problem by creating a group "video" in System => Users and Groups and adding myself as user to the group, but that didn't work for me either.

I also tried disabling, purging and reinstalling the nvidia drivers, but that didn't help.

Now glxgears doesn't work any more even with sudo. It doesn't crash x when started with sudo, but closes with an "abort" message.

On yet another thread I saw a reference to the possibility that the Direct Rendering Module may fail to load. That led me to
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriTroubleshooting which indicates that the direct rendering module must be loaded and be able to find the video card in order for direct rendering to work. I ran the command "dmesg | grep drm", which returned no output. I don't know the significance of that, given the fact that nvidia-settings does report "yes" for direct rendering when started with sudo.

Finally, I came across the suggestion on another thread to install xserver-xgl. I'm reluctant to do that, because I think I remember reading that Hardy doesn't use xgl.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John Harrington
May 1st, 2008, 05:04 AM
I think I have solved this problem, although I don't understand the issues. I noticed that although I created a "video" group and added myself as user, "video" did not appear when I ran "groups" in a terminal. I also noticed that on the Properties => Permissions tab of /dev/nvidiactl, the group was given as "44" rather than "video," and video was assigned the group number 1002 (or something like that) under System => Users and Groups. I therefore changed the group number for video to 44 in the Users and Groups interface. That cause video to disappear entirely from the interface, and it still isn't there. (I think no group with a group number lower than 100 appears there.) However, after rebooting again, I appear as a member of "video" when I run "groups" in a terminal, and I now have permission to access /dev/nvidiactl. Direct rendering now seems to work perfectly on compiz and glxgears without having to run as root.

lovinglinux
April 25th, 2009, 03:20 AM
I think I have solved this problem, although I don't understand the issues. I noticed that although I created a "video" group and added myself as user, "video" did not appear when I ran "groups" in a terminal. I also noticed that on the Properties => Permissions tab of /dev/nvidiactl, the group was given as "44" rather than "video," and video was assigned the group number 1002 (or something like that) under System => Users and Groups. I therefore changed the group number for video to 44 in the Users and Groups interface. That cause video to disappear entirely from the interface, and it still isn't there. (I think no group with a group number lower than 100 appears there.) However, after rebooting again, I appear as a member of "video" when I run "groups" in a terminal, and I now have permission to access /dev/nvidiactl. Direct rendering now seems to work perfectly on compiz and glxgears without having to run as root.

I know this is an old thread, but I would like to say that this solved my problem in Jaunty. Just changed the group to 44 and rebooted. Everything is fine now.

dcstar
May 1st, 2009, 08:13 AM
I know this is an old thread, but I would like to say that this solved my problem in Jaunty. Just changed the group to 44 and rebooted. Everything is fine now.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-180/+bug/370249