nVidia drivers.... need help

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Acid_1
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nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

Ok so I'm having some issues here. I can give you whatever output you want from a terminal, but first let me fill you in on my hardware specs, what I've done, and what I intend to do.

First off, I have an nVidia GeForce 9600M GT, to which I am attempting to install drivers for.

Now, I had them running just fine a few weeks ago. I had built my own kernel to 3.9.4, and it was working fine. Now here's where the bs starts. (Keep in mind, I do this all the time, and never had issues before, so don't tell me not to compile my own kernel. Thanks)

I compiled my new kernel (3.10.2), and installed the headers and image files. Turns out nouveau has some issues with the nVidia drivers. So I blacklisted nouveau in the boot options, and it boots, but in low-graphics with metacity.

Ok, well I figured from here I'd install the nVidia drivers. I've tried nvidia-common, and the drivers 319 from nvidia's site. Neither worked, but the 319 won't install unless nouveau is blacklisted. However, when nouveau is blacklisted, I was unable to access my tty1-6 screens, so I couldn't even install the nvidia drivers. So I used the recovery boot, and then chose to boot regular from that point, and I could access tty1-6.

I'm at the point where I've currently install nvidia-common, can boot with 'blacklist.nouveau=1' in the options, used 'nvidia-xconfig' as root, and have access to tty1-6. The problem is--cinnamon keeps crashing into fallback mode now. How am I going to fix this.

Seriously, why is the nouveau drivers installed by default? They are bs. I'd rather run in low-graphics mode.

Thanks for the help :)
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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HoppityBob

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by HoppityBob »

I feel your pain as I've spent the past month trying to install them but to no avail, the best until just the past half hour (and another full day wasted) being a black low res screen and a cursor that moves, and nothing else. However, I've just discovered that for some reason the X-Swap ppa works for some reason, without even blacklisting nouveau.

I did..

sudo apt-get install jockey
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

Then use jockey (Additional Drivers app) to ensure 304 is activated and reboot. It's an old driver but it worked for me bar I've yet to figure out how to get my backlighting levels to work as they've stopped, sigh.
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

HoppityBob wrote:I feel your pain as I've spent the past month trying to install them but to no avail, the best until just the past half hour (and another full day wasted) being a black low res screen and a cursor that moves, and nothing else. However, I've just discovered that for some reason the X-Swap ppa works for some reason, without even blacklisting nouveau.

I did..

sudo apt-get install jockey
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

Then use jockey (Additional Drivers app) to ensure 304 is activated and reboot. It's an old driver but it worked for me bar I've yet to figure out how to get my backlighting levels to work as they've stopped, sigh.

Gave that a shot. Still nothing is happening.

Joceky is replaced by software-sources program, btw.

However, I still don't have any luck with that PPA's version of nvidia-current nvidia-settings.

It seems to be an issue across all distros, Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, etc.

I'm not sure what's going on....
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roblm
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by roblm »

Can you run these commands in the Terminal to see what version of the gcc compiler is listed:

cat /proc/version
gcc -v
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

Code: Select all

Linux version 3.10.2-sager (root@cinnybunns) (gcc version 4.7.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.2-2ubuntu1) ) #1 SMP Tue Jul 23 11:15:47 CST 2013

Code: Select all

Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gcc
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.7/lto-wrapper
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.2-2ubuntu1' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.7/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,go,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --program-suffix=-4.7 --enable-shared --enable-linker-build-id --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.7 --libdir=/usr/lib --enable-nls --with-sysroot=/ --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-libstdcxx-time=yes --enable-gnu-unique-object --enable-plugin --enable-objc-gc --disable-werror --with-arch-32=i686 --with-tune=generic --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.7.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.2-2ubuntu1) 
4.7.2 would be the version.
maciimacii

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by maciimacii »

After letting the Nvidia driver install blacklist Nouveau (or manually blacklisting Nouvea) then Mint should start up with a default video driver (probably vesa) and then just go through the Nvidia install again.

If you are not getting a working default video driver after blacklisting Nouveau, well that's a bit strange because it should work.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=132665
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roblm
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by roblm »

Were you ever able to install any Nvidia drivers with the 3.9.4 kernel?

From the testing I did on my Mint 14 and 15 systems, I was able to download and install the 304, 310 and three versions of the 319 drivers without any problems.

On fresh installations with the nouveau driver installed, I then installed newer kernels from this site:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

I tried the 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11 kernels on both systems. Then I downloaded and attempted to install the Nvidia 319 driver. I had the same problem as you, that I was unable to access the virtual console tty1 screen after blacklisting the nouveau driver and rebooting. However, even
if I had been able to access tty1, the installation would still have failed because all of those kernels were compiled with gcc version 4.6, and gcc 4.7 is installed on Mint 14 and 15 for compiling driver modules. During the installation the NVIDIA kernel module needs to be built (compiled) with the same compiler version that was used to compile your operating system kernel.

But your 3.10 kernel was compiled with version 4.7 so I don't know why it doesn't work.
Have you disabled the nouveau driver in the grub boot file and in the modprobe.d folder as suggested by Nvidia?
You can check out the method I use in the link below. The topic deals with Mint Debian Edition but also applies to Mint Cinnamon and Mate.
Go down to the installation section:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=191&t=134613

In Mint 14 after installing the 3.10 kernel, I also tried to install the Nvidia driver from Additional Drivers and it failed. The vesa driver was enabled.

That's why I don't recommend installing newer kernels unless you're trying to fix a critical problem because too often I've read where something else gets broken, and it's best to use the kernels available through the linux distribution's package manager.
Last edited by roblm on Mon Jul 29, 2013 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
MissileCop
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by MissileCop »

What error messages were listed in the nvidia-installer.log?

I tried to install the Nvidia 319.32 and 325.08 drivers to my desktop LMDE build with the Liquorix 3.9.11 kernel yesterday, and couldn't install either. Looking at the nvidia-installer.log showed that the Nvidia installer was looking for libc6-2.14, and 2.13 was the current version in the LMDE repository. I added Wheezy Testing repositories to my sources.list to get the newer version, and installed libc6-2.17. Once I installed that, I was able to run the Nvidia installer, and everything then installed properly.

This version mismatch may or may not be part of your troubles. Something to look at and either confirm, or rule out.
nomko

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by nomko »

Acid_1 wrote:I compiled my new kernel (3.10.2), and installed the headers and image files.
I think this is the problem. There's a reason why Mint never, never updates the kernel.....
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

roblm wrote:Were you ever able to install any Nvidia drivers with the 3.9.4 kernel?

From the testing I did on my Mint 14 and 15 systems, I was able to download and install the 304, 310 and three versions of the 319 drivers without any problems.

On fresh installations with the nouveau driver installed, I then installed newer kernels from this site:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

I tried the 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11 kernels on both systems. Then I downloaded and attempted to install the Nvidia 319 driver. I had the same problem as you, that I was unable to access the virtual console tty1 screen after blacklisting the nouveau driver and rebooting. However, even
if I had been able to access tty1, the installation would still have failed because all of those kernels were compiled with gcc version 4.6, and gcc 4.7 is installed on Mint 14 and 15 for compiling driver modules. During the installation the NVIDIA kernel module needs to be built (compiled) with the same compiler version that was used to compile your operating system kernel.

But your 3.10 kernel was compiled with version 4.7 so I don't know why it doesn't work.
Have you disabled the nouveau driver in the grub boot file and in the modprobe.d folder as suggested by Nvidia?
You can check out the method I use in the link below. The topic deals with Mint Debian Edition but also applies to Mint Cinnamon and Mate.
Go down to the installation section:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=191&t=134613

In Mint 14 after installing the 3.10 kernel, I also tried to install the Nvidia driver from Additional Drivers and it failed. The vesa driver was enabled.

That's why I don't recommend installing newer kernels unless you're trying to fix a particular problem because too often I've read where something else gets broken, and it's best to use the kernels available through the linux distribution's package manager.


HoppityBob:

I noticed that you never got any responses from your topic. I'm not that familiar with KDE. Do you get the same versions of the gcc compiler when you run these two commands:
cat /proc/version
gcc -v

Did your backlight problem start after installing the 304 driver? Is the problem with the screen brightness or keyboard backlight?
Yea the nVidia drivers were fine while I had kernel 3.9.4 installed, it's just been updates since then. I tried first with the 3.10 RC's and then with their final builds and haven't had any luck with them.
nomko wrote:
Acid_1 wrote:I compiled my new kernel (3.10.2), and installed the headers and image files.
I think this is the problem. There's a reason why Mint never, never updates the kernel.....
I've done it many times before without any issues.
MissileCop wrote:What error messages were listed in the nvidia-installer.log?

I tried to install the Nvidia 319.32 and 325.08 drivers to my desktop LMDE build with the Liquorix 3.9.11 kernel yesterday, and couldn't install either. Looking at the nvidia-installer.log showed that the Nvidia installer was looking for libc6-2.14, and 2.13 was the current version in the LMDE repository. I added Wheezy Testing repositories to my sources.list to get the newer version, and installed libc6-2.17. Once I installed that, I was able to run the Nvidia installer, and everything then installed properly.

This version mismatch may or may not be part of your troubles. Something to look at and either confirm, or rule out.

I'll give this a look into later today. Just got off work, gonna relax for a bit first. Will post back soon.



Thanks everyone so much for your help.
Last edited by Acid_1 on Sat Jul 27, 2013 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
nomko

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by nomko »

I didn't replied to the message of MissileCop.... Ithink your quotations are placed wrong here..

I only replied to your statement that you updated your kernel which in my opinion is the cause of your problem (i can tell from own experience). I only replied with that there's a big reason why Mint never, never updates the kernel.
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

heh heh whoops I was quoting too much and lost track where things were. Fixed now. :D
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

Looking at the log, it seems like I have a trouble with DKMS for my kernel.

Code: Select all

nvidia-installer log file '/var/log/nvidia-installer.log'
creation time: Tue Jul 23 17:26:13 2013
installer version: 319.32

PATH: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

nvidia-installer command line:
    ./nvidia-installer

Using: nvidia-installer ncurses user interface
-> License accepted.
-> Installing NVIDIA driver version 319.32.
-> There appears to already be a driver installed on your system (version: 319.32).  As part of installing this driver (version: 319.32), the existing driver will be uninstalled.  Are you sure you want to continue? ('no' will abort installation) (Answer: Yes)
-> Running distribution scripts
   executing: '/usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install'...
-> done.
-> The distribution-provided pre-install script failed!  Continue installation anyway? (Answer: Yes)
-> Would you like to register the kernel module sources with DKMS? This will allow DKMS to automatically build a new module, if you install a different kernel later. (Answer: Yes)
-> Installing both new and classic TLS OpenGL libraries.
-> Installing both new and classic TLS 32bit OpenGL libraries.
-> Install NVIDIA's 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries? (Answer: No)
-> Parsing log file:
-> done.
-> Validating previous installation:
-> The previously installed file '/usr/lib/libGL.la' seems to have changed, but `prelink -u` failed; unable to restore '/usr/lib/libGL.la' to an un-prelinked state.
-> Un-prelinking unsuccessful: '/usr/lib/libGL.la' will not be uninstalled.
-> done.
WARNING: Your driver installation has been altered since it was initially installed; this may happen, for example, if you have since installed the NVIDIA driver through a mechanism other than nvidia-installer (such as your distribution's native package management system).  nvidia-installer will attempt to uninstall as best it can.  Please see the file '/var/log/nvidia-installer.log' for details.
-> Uninstalling NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for Linux-x86_64 (1.0-31932 (319.32)):
-> DKMS module detected; removing...
-> done.
-> Uninstallation of existing driver: NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for Linux-x86_64 (319.32) is complete.
-> Searching for conflicting X files:
-> done.
-> Searching for conflicting OpenGL files:
-> done.
-> Installing 'NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for Linux-x86_64' (319.32):
   executing: '/sbin/ldconfig'...
   executing: '/sbin/depmod -aq'...
-> done.
-> Driver file installation is complete.
-> Installing DKMS kernel module:
ERROR: Failed to run `/usr/sbin/dkms build -m nvidia -v 319.32 -k 3.10.2-sager`: 
Kernel preparation unnecessary for this kernel.  Skipping...

Building module:
cleaning build area....
make KERNELRELEASE=3.10.2-sager module KERNEL_UNAME=3.10.2-sager.......(bad exit status: 2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/dkms_packages.py", line 22, in <module>
    import apport
ImportError: No module named apport
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.10.2-sager (x86_64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/nvidia/319.32/build/make.log for more information.
-> error.
ERROR: Failed to install the kernel module through DKMS. No kernel module was installed; please try installing again without DKMS, or check the DKMS logs for more information.
ERROR: Installation has failed.  Please see the file '/var/log/nvidia-installer.log' for details.  You may find suggestions on fixing installation problems in the README available on the Linux driver download page at www.nvidia.com.
I'm not sure what the problem is. Gonna try and re-install the driver from their site using the 3.9.4 and see what's different in the logfile, if it even installs.
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

ok, so perhaps it is something to do with my kernel, but I don't know why.

If I do an

Code: Select all

ls /lib/modules/3.10.2-sager
I find this:

Code: Select all

build                modules.dep.bin      modules.seriomap
kernel               modules.devname      modules.softdep
modules.alias        modules.ieee1394map  modules.symbols
modules.alias.bin    modules.inputmap     modules.symbols.bin
modules.builtin      modules.isapnpmap    modules.usbmap
modules.builtin.bin  modules.ofmap        source
modules.ccwmap       modules.order
modules.dep          modules.pcimap
But if I do it from the latest Mint-issued kernel (/lib/modules/3.5.0-36-generic), it has a folder called initrd with a file named vesafb.ko

Code: Select all

adam@cinnybunns ~ $ ls /lib/modules/3.5.0-36-generic/
build              modules.builtin.bin  modules.inputmap   modules.softdep
initrd             modules.ccwmap       modules.isapnpmap  modules.symbols
kernel             modules.dep          modules.ofmap      modules.symbols.bin
modules.alias      modules.dep.bin      modules.order      modules.usbmap
modules.alias.bin  modules.devname      modules.pcimap     updates
modules.builtin    modules.ieee1394map  modules.seriomap
nomko

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by nomko »

As i said, there's a reason why Mint never, never, never, never updates the kernel!
I did it also a couple of times and after that i was left behind with a system that crippled my graphics as well and i couldn't fix it. Lessons learned, never updated the kernel manually.
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by MissileCop »

I've read elsewhere that kernel versions 3.6 - 3.8 couldn't use DKMS with the Nvidia installer. I don't know if this issue has been resolved for later kernels or not. When I went through the Nvidia installer, I answered the prompt to NOT use the DKMS module. I believe that I answered all of the other prompts with whatever was the default selection.

We'll get this figured out yet! :mrgreen:
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Nick Payne »

If you have a look at https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/linux/, you will find quite a number of threads dealing with the incompatibility of current nVidia drivers and the 3.10 kernel. There are some patches available to allow various versions of the driver to be built against the 3.10 kernel.
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Nick Payne »

One of the moderators on the nVidia dev forums has just posted a msg saying that support for 3.10 kernel is in the next driver release:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... el-3-10-0/
oldsmokey

Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by oldsmokey »

I have had most luck using xorg edgers ppa for both nvidia gtx-660 and my ati-7870 amd is a bit faster for gaming and the edgers ppa keeps things up to date.
do not use unless you know what you are doing and like to reload often as i do,this gives you mostly the latest drivers for both nvidia and ati also intel.I also will add I use the latest Liquorix kernel with this method and no probs as of late.
ymmv
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Re: nVidia drivers.... need help

Post by Acid_1 »

Okay, the issue was that nVidia doesn't work with the newest kernels... Sometimes you have to wait a few months after a kernel release for the nVidia drivers to add support. Often times though, patches are available for drivers that you can apply to get them to work with more recent kernels.

So I'm just gonna stay on 3.9 for a while till 3.11 is supported.
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