Nvidia drivers newer than 7174 will not work on cards older than GeForce 3. http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-7664/README.txt has a listing of the cards that are not supported and those that are. I have a GeForce2 and after updating to the latest ~x86 drivers all I received upon starting X were the usual Xorg starting messages, followed by a black screen with a grey cursor in the upper left hand corner. I could not switch to another term to kill X and had to restart the machine entirely. Could we maybe add a warning about this with info on installing the legacy drivers for those of us with older cards.
Very anoying indeed. I had the same problem as the one you and others describe. Now the 3d acceleration dont work anymore... I also had the problem that when I reboot my machine, the X server tries to start, and the probelm you describe started again: grey screen, cant do anything... Actually, if u look very toroughly (at least for me), the virtual terminals where running, but almost unvisible (completely grey), but I can use them, with VERY strong glasses ;) ... So I advise to anyone having this problem to: either 1) log on the machine via ssh 2) turn the contrast of their monitor to max, and try and see if the virtual terminals work... 3) edit "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" and replace the 'Driver "nvidia"' line with 'Driver "nv"' 4) restart the x server (e.g. "/etc/init.d/xdm restart" as root) Of course the nvidia drivers will not be used anymore, while all the 3d acceleration consequences... If u really want the nvidia drivers, user kf4yfd (whoever this may be...) explains how to force portage to keep the old versions of nvidia driver and linux kernel here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-316576.html This is not a bug fix, its just survival whilst awaiting for a buggfix... ;) Thx to all... Olivier
Any news on this issue?!? In the log-messages the new drivers gives when used with old boards, it says that we should start using nvidias legacy drivers. Does anybody know if nvidia have produced such drivers?!? Another problem with keeping the old drivers is that the newer kernels (some 2.6.13-rc's and the 2.6.13 final) have changed the api that non-free drivers can talk to udev. That means that older drivers dosen't know how to talk to udev and hence they cannot create /dev/{nvidiaX,nvidiactl}, which means that X-{org,free} cannot use the nvidia driver. The problem is described here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-333862-highlight-nvidia0.html http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=48782
I agree that the warning should be added, though I'll leave that to the maintainer. I'm sure he's quite busy, so hopefully this bug will hold us over until he gets to it. There's very little we can do about the binary drivers. Binary breakage is completely out of our control.
(In reply to comment #0) > Nvidia drivers newer than 7174 will not work on cards older than GeForce 3. Hi, I have an nVidia TNT2 (M64). This card is not supported by drivers never than 7174.... That's the first point. The second point is that my X.org server don't start if I install the nvidia-kernel 7174 "pkg 0", I have to manually update the ebuild to change to "pkg 1" to get the driver working with 2.6.12 kernels. Here is the link for nvidia-kernel 7174-pkg1 : http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-7174/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1.run Regards, Pierre Y.
We can't do anything about Nvidia's policy... closing.
