Nvidia headaches or bad motherboard?

[David Fox]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Young <tuxman at knology.net> wrote:
>        Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 Allendale 2.2GHz 1MB L2 Cache
>
>        ECS GF7100PVT-M3  Motherboard with onboard graphics.
>        North Bridge    NVIDIA GeForce 7100
>        South Bridge    nForce 630i
>        http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135066

I have a similar system (ECS, 6100-pn-m) but it is an amd64 dual core
cpu, rather than an intel one, and I have a nForce 430 chipset and an
nVidia 6100 on chip video controller.

I went straight to a 64 bit Ubuntu HH install on this new system
approximately 2.5 months ago, and originally got the nvidia-glx
(that's the usermode graphics portion of the driver) working in
relatively short order, but only because I remembered having to do it
in Debian Lenny, running an older motherboard and an nVidia FX 5200
for some time -- the ECS motherboard replaced it. I also saved off my
old xorg.conf file from Debian and used it in Ubuntu.

I'm not so sure I could get it up and running in the same way doing it
"through the menus" (aka the ubuntu way) but it wasn't too difficult
to get it up and running via the command line, at least initially,
using the driver version 169.12. Note on my system, there are some
bizarre artifacts on the screen on first loading up X, but those can
be removed if one does first a ctrl-alt-F1 (text mode) followed by
alt-F7. Even compiz works (nicely, too).

I had some system problems (btw, how is the stability of that MB, as I
have had issues here, possibly overheating related, although my
"thermostat" rarely if ever goes above 57 degrees C. I've had errors
come from running something like folding at home for a long period of
time, although I've been running seti at home since approx day one on the
motherboard, and no strange effects, so far, that I can attribute
directly to that app. I've also had 2 really bizarre failures where
parts of my filesystem were hosed (I could restore from backups - and
other issues with the filesystem not being 100% reliable, such as when
dealing with lots of writes in one of two of my xfs partitions (/home
& /storage).  I only mention this sidebar of sorts because you have a
similar MB as I do.

And, one of those system problems made it not able to boot X. So I
spent sometime trying to reinstall the nvidia 169.12 driver, using the
same procedure as before, to no avail. Eventually I gave up and
installed the nvidia driver 173.09 from nvidia's site. It's not the
best way to do this, because there's no package management involved if
and when nvidia comes up with driver improvements.

Things work OK now. However, there's one gotcha: the driver module
will not load on boot, and I cannot modprobe it. I can only insmod it.
Not too terrible, although it takes a little more work to get back to
where I want to be after a reboot, and I don't reboot very often.