[Eug-lug] Using a Live CD to unscrew yourself

[alan]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, erock23175 at aol.com wrote:

> Well as many of you know I am embarking on the adventure of trying to install an accelerated graphics card. Well yesterday I tried to do just that after coming home (had to extract it from my Windows box first), and failed. For some reason I was under the impression that the software was installed and all I had to do was type "nv" in the field for Device on my xorg.conf file, and bam UT2K4 here I come!.....Wrong! for some stupid reason Xserver wouldn't work and I got that annoying blue red grey and white screen telling me something is wrong with my video. I go to edit the Device field (and I forgot to back up my previous settings. So now I can't even get the display to work with the card I took out of the machine to begin with! Then it hit me, the live CD loads whether you've got the right drivers for the card installed or not! SO I booted off the CD, opened the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in nano, copied down the right entry for the card listed under "Device" in the Display se
 ction, restarted without the CD, got a command prompt and entered the correct info into the "Device" line of my existing xorg.conf file. Success!  Now that I know it works with my current card, I'm left to wonder, would the same work for my Nvidia card?

There is no way that you will be able to play UT2k4 with the nv driver. 
It does not have enough 3d hardware acceleration to make the game 
playable.

You need to get a copy of the commercial nVIDIA closed source driver and 
install that.  (Yes, I know that is blasphemy, but it is the only way to 
get acceptable speeds from the card.)

I would set the default initlevel to 3 before trying to get it to compile 
the kernel module.  (Ubintu uses a different init level setting.  You need 
to not be in X when it compiles.)

You will need to have the xorg-sdk and kernel-headers installed as well. 
(The xorg-sdk has a routine that lets the install figure out where the 
xorg modules are installed.)

When it asks if you want it to reconfigure xorg.conf, let it.  It will 
make (most) of the needed changes.  (If you want to get all the other 
bells and whistles the card offers (like if you want to run 
beryl/compiz/compiz-fusion) you will need to run the nvidia-xconfig 
program from the command line with a big pile of options.)

There are rpms for the kernel module, but I have had pretty poor luck with 
them.  It crashes and freezes the machine on my laptop.

If you have any questions on getting it working, drop me an e-mail.

-- 
Refrigerator Rule #1: If you don't remember when you bought it, Don't eat it.