Nvidia headaches or bad motherboard?

[Karl Larsen]

David Fox wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
    This is why new users return to Windows :-)

Karl

-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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