Nvidia Driver 270.41.06

[billksun]

Are they coming soon to PC-BSD 8.x? I just installed a shiny new Geforce GTX 560 Ti only to find out that the drivers are too old.

[kmoore134]

Rolling a patch for it now, should be out soon.

[Juju]

Rolling a patch for it now, should be out soon.


Not to hijack this thread Kris, but is there a way to add amd64 support?

Tried to compile from source but could not finish because the compiled modules were for i386.

Thanks.

--
Juju

[billksun]

Rolling a patch for it now, should be out soon.

Thanks Kris!

Not to hijack this thread Kris, but is there a way to add amd64 support?

I thought Nvidia has AMD64 drivers now? At least it is listed on their website...

[Juju]

...

I thought Nvidia has AMD64 drivers now? At least it is listed on their website...


Must have done something wrong when I compiled.

I guess I'll wait for Kris' PBI.

--
Juju

[kmoore134]

The system update should be live now. It includes both amd64 and i386.

[Juju]

Fails to install on AMD64 Dell Opteron box.

Tried five times.

Please see attached screen snapshoot.

--
Juju

[kmoore134]

It hasn't hit all the mirrors yet. Change yours to automatic and give it another shot.

[billksun]

Is this available for PC-BSD 8.1 as well? My system update didn't find anything to update to.

[Juju]

Thanks Kris.

I did as instructed and. supposedly, the update was successful.

Unfortunately, the nVidia driver refuses to work with my system. Thankfully the nv driver still works well.

I rebooted and tapped 7 when Beastie came up. The system crashed three seconds later.

Then, configured a new xorg.conf with "nvidia-xconfig" (from my earlier unsuccessful attempt to compile the driver). It didn't crash this time, but it just hung after Xorg took over (black screen with small white square on left top corner) and I had to give it the three-fingered salute.

Next tried changing "nv" to "nvidia" as the driver on my working xorg.conf, same black screen with small white square on left top corner.

Finally tapped 2 when Beastie came up and manually loaded the "nvidia.ko" module (noticed that the upgrade did not add it to "/boot/modules"). Still no joy, same result as the previous two.

Finally, gave up went back to my working xorg.conf with the nv driver.

I remember having the same problems with the nVidia proprietary driver a couple of years ago while running Ubuntu on the same box.

I believe that it has something to do with my motherboard having an ATI video chip that cannot be disabled as well as the 8400 GS nVidia card.

Any idea how to deinstall the upgrade?

Thank you.

--
Juju

[billksun]

Juju,

What version of PC-BSD are you using? I don't even get the update notification on my PC-BSD 8.1.

On another note, Kris, if you are not rolling the Nvidia driver update for 8.1, is it safe to manually install it from Nvidia?

[Juju]

Juju,

What version of PC-BSD are you using? I don't even get the update notification on my PC-BSD 8.1. ...


Hello billksun.

8.2 with Gnome desktop.

Although "Software Manager" is not supposed to work from Gnome, it works for me. However, I logged out of Gnome and into KDE to install the nVidia driver (just in case).

--
Juju

[billksun]

Hi Juju,

I think you should be able to "downgrade" by running "option 7" again when booting to configure the display driver. Just select an older version of nvidia driver from the list.

[Juju]

Hello and thank you billksun.

Unfortunately tapping 7 crashes my box.

Thinking about, since I'm not using the nvidia driver, it's not affecting my system in any way -- so I'll leave it alone.

I have actually expressly forced use of the "nv" driver for years (since my Ubuntu days) to avoid problems with the nvidia and the "nouveau" drivers.

Perhaps, when I have a free day or two (and wish to torture myself), I'll give it another go and figure out why it doesn't work for me. Although, as I've said may times, I suspect that it doesn't like the motherboard ati chip (that cannot be disabled).

Thanks again.

--
Juju

[billksun]

Hi Julu,

I also have onboard ATI graphics that cannot be disabled in the BIOS (I can only select the display initialization order, ie., PCI-E first, then IGP). But, at the very least I can get to the display driver "wizard" after selecting option 7 in the boot menu.

I guess a boot log should be able to tell you more about what went wrong (or disabling the splash screen so that you can see the text), but unfortunately, I am not a *BSD expert, so I am unfit to instruct you on this. Maybe someone with more expertise can help you when you feel like tackling this again.

[Juju]

Hi Julu,

... Maybe someone with more expertise can help you when you feel like tackling this again.


Noted, thank you.

--
Juju

[billksun]

Just wanted to report back on what I ended up doing.

So, I couldn't wait any longer to get my new graphics card working under PC-BSD 8.1 so I took the plunge and installed the NVIDIA driver from the NVIDIA website.

The installation process was easier than I expected. The only wrinkle I had was missing the kernel source. Which I grabbed from PC-BSD's built-in system tool. After waiting for the kernel source to download, I just ran "make install" as root and everything installed without a hitch.

Now the configuration process was a bit confusing, as in addition to running "nvidia-xconfig" as root, I wanted to run "nvidia-settings" to configure the display resolution. However, the utility wouldn't run as root, so I had to run it as a regular user. But this caused another problem, as the utility cannot write the newly generated config file into /etc/X11. I ended up saving the generated xorg.conf to my home directory and then manually copying it to /etc/X11. But after that, everything just worked!

Also, as weird as it may sound, before I got the NVIDIA driver working my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS would not work properly. All that I every got out of the sound card was a loud buzzing or beating noise. After the NVIDIA drivers were installed and loaded, the sound came back and was as crisp and rich as ever. I recently purchased a pair of JVC HARX-900 headphones and this is the first time I've been able to use them under PC-BSD. I have to say they sound better in PC-BSD than in Windows 7. The sound stage seems fuller, and the slightly tinny sound on Win7 is completely gone in PC-BSD. I'm not sure if this is due to a better default equalizer setting or whatnot, but I'm really satisfied with the results.

Another note: in case anyone is wondering, the reason that I didn't upgrade to 8.2 is because the 8.2 installer could not detect my ZFS installation (I have /boot in UFS, but the rest in ZFS mirrored mode). Otherwise, I would've upgraded back when, and just have the updater update my NVIDIA drivers.

[kmoore134]

Glad you were able to get the new driver running :)

I'll have to look into the installer upgrade stuff to fix the ZFS
upgrade bug, but in the meanwhile, what I do is just make a backup of
/usr/home, install fresh, and restore that to get my files back, this
process is fairly simple:

# cd /usr/home
# tar cvjf /usr/home-bak.tbz .
<Move home-bak.tbz to another machine with sftp>
<Reinstall Fresh>
<When the display wizard comes up, fetch home-bak.tbz to /usr/home,
bring up xterm>
# cd /usr/home
# tar xvf home-bak.tbz
<Finish video setup, and login>