NVidia driver installation on PCBSD 9 rc 3 beta

[Carr]

Rakor

My apologies for not having replied earlier. I am going to be involved in some business things that will dominate my time through the first part of next week. I will address your recommendations and kind tutelage at that point.

Again my apologies
Carr

[Rakor]

Don't be hasty... I have all the time to wait for your problems....

[Carr]

Rakor

Had a bit to mess with the machine yesterday. While I was doing other things here and had the log viewer open for my hardware firewall-- and started the machine with 9 rc3 on it..... I noticed a flood of outgoing packets to pbidir.com in San Jose California, from various forkings of gamin running on the machine--with three instances of gam_server running. As fast as I would kill these processes they would be re spawned. They were being logged by the firewall, outbound at 3-4 per second. Hmmmm.

I did a bit more messing about with the driver, forced it to load on boot but was unable to configure it apparently because the linux emulation support was not loaded. As tempermental as X is I imagine I broke it pretty thoroughly.

Finally I had been messing around with this for a number of hours (that happens to me quite frequently) and I gave up in disgust. I loaded GPartd, deleted the partition and reloaded PCBSD 8.2. Its quite nice, lighter on resources than 9 RC3, and recognized the NVidia card on install and loaded the correct NVidia driver. After first boot the software manager even offered the update to the most recent NVidia driver which went flawlessly. I only hope that 9 stable is as good as 8.2, it is a nice package. I am sorry to say that I got disgusted with the constant bugs in 9Rc3 and am not versed enough on Unix any more to be able to make the corrections easily. My Unix experience is from many many years ago. That having been said most of the documentation that I have found for PCBSD is pretty thotough as are the man pages. Even so many things that I remember from the Unix I knew arent necessarily true today, many of them where things are and how they interact.....I did thoroughly enjoy running the 9 beta and really like 8.2 so far. I had forgotten the ease of using CLI rather than GUI for many system tasks. Mousing gets pretty old.
Many thanks for your help and kind interest
Carr

as a final comment I wish I spoke German well enough to read your BSD notes!!

[Rakor]

Hi Carr!

Yes you are right, the driver needs the Linux-Emulation. This should be done by the nvidia-tool itself, by hand you just have to add the line 'linux_enable="YES"' to the '/etc/rc.conf' or load it temporarely by 'kldload linux'. Also you need the linux-compat libs installed, but this should be available ob PC-BS Dby default (I think).

Sad that it wasn't working for you. Ans also strange that you are running the 8.2 without issues.
The gam_server checks for filesystemchanges and is a really annoying thing. I disabled it on my machines for a lot of directories (because it blocks the umount). I dont know why I makes network traffic?! The communication to pbidir.com seem to be the search for new updates, I think (but don't know).

Hope you get it to run when 9.0 will be announced.

[kmoore134]

Linux emulation is turned on by default, so I'm not sure why it would
have failed in this case. Can you provide any additional details about
the error besides it didn't work? Messages or logs?

[Basnoff]

Hello all!

I'm new to PC-BSD, and just installed 9.0 release an hour ago... Installed fine but the only issue I have is the one Carr described. I was going to start a new thread but since my poblem fits Carrs description perfectly I figured it would be better to wake this thread up...

Same symptoms, but I do need to add that this seems to be true for most linux distros as well. Something in the >200 drivers does not like my GO 7700 card. In linux I just mask versions over 200 and stick with 177... Haven't figured out how to do that here yet.

But I would like to get this sorted. Are there any log-files I should post here?

Also - since there is no welcome-section on this forum I'll just mention it here - I'm actually very happy about the smoothness of the installation procedure! I consider the above a minor issue since I can get work done with nv... But still nVidia drivers would be nicer.

Anyway excellent job by de PC-BSD devs!

[Apaullo]

Hello all,

I'm very new to bsd. I installed 8.2 as my first bsd about 3 days ago. All was perfect and I was very happy with PC-BSD. Then to my joy 9.0 came out. I downloaded and installed it.

Now, my issue is identical in all regards to OP. Pondering going back to 8.2, but would really like fix this for the learning experience.

Thanks in advance

EDIT: perhaps it would be helpful to give the hardware information. I have an NVidia GeForce GO 7600.

[Basnoff]

Apaullo

I followed the instructions supercobrajet gave here:
http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=15885

It works for me now!

[Memento]

Am also new to BSD. Installed 8.2 to system earlier in the week and had problems with the nvidia drivers. Found that my card, quadro fx 500 needed the older driver, so was trying to install the 173.x.x drivers with help from irc.

I was told that 9.0 was out, so decided to give it a try in hopes that the headaches that I was having installing the 173.x.x drivers in 8.2 would have been solved. Was disappointed.

As Carr mentioned, the system is noticeably slower in 9.0. Painfully so by my observation. With KDE it is close to unusable and the mouse would often freeze if no inputs have been pressed for a while. (This does not happen in Fluxbox). Had problems with automounting usbsticks too.

Was unable to install the ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/po...-173.14.31.tbz driver even with the help on the irc channel, and am about to retry the pc-bsd 8.2 install to see if that can be made to work using what I have learned so far.

[kmoore134]

Check the output of "top" in KDE, I've seen a bug when using a "re0"
network device that causes KDE4 to keep using 100% of CPU...

If you run another DE you can see if it speeds way up