Trouble with Nvidia driver

April 13th, 2012 - 02:50 pm ET by Eduardo Bearzoti | Report spam
Hello everybody. I'm having troubles to make X server work with Debian
Squeeze, installed from scratch on my PC. Some information on my hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2900 MHz

Video card (lspci output):
nvidia Corporation G86[GeForce 8400 GS] (rev a1)

I have used kernel 2.6.32-5-amd64.

When I first installed Squeeze, the whole system froze when gdm3
was initialized. Then, searching the web, I found this detailed wiki:

http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

aimed at installing and configuring Nvidia drivers. Following its
steps, I first tried to install the free driver "noveau", as
suggested. The problem remained. Then I followed the steps to
install the non-free Nvidia drivers, using the Debian driver packages
(non-free APT sources). These steps were:

1) install the module kernel, using the packages "module-assistant"
and "nvidia-kernel-common". The following command was run:

m-a auto-install nvidia-kernel-source

and installation was done.

2) Install the NVIDIA X driver and user-space libraries. This was
successfully done by installing the Debian package "nvidia-glx". I checked
that the package versions matched (version 195.36.31).

3) Configure X to use the nvidia driver. The following command was run:

Xorg -configure

then I modified the xorg.conf.new file, commenting out the module lines
referring to the "dri" modules, and changing the device driver to "nvidia":

Section "Module"
Load "extmod"
# Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
# Load "dri2"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "G86 [GeForce 8400 GS]"
BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

Then I saved this file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After re-booting,
I noticed that the nvidia driver was successfully loaded. In the
lsmod output there is:

Module Size Used by
nvidia 10670090 24

Besides, there are no error messages in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file.
(I listed the NVIDIA-related lines of this file bellow)

Now prompt terminals are available, and gdm3 login is displayed on
terminal 7. However, when attempting to login trough gdm3, the whole
system freezes again. I have read the whole README.txt of the nvidia-glx
package, and I could not find anything to deal with this trouble. The
/var/log/Xorg.0.log is also not helpful, since it is created when gdm3
is started, that is, before the trouble occurs.

I am not willing to use Nvidia's installer (downloading
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.33.run), because I prefer to use the Debian
package management tools. But does anyone think it could solve the
problem? Anyway, any help would be very very appreciated, please.
I'm not sure if the following is of any help, but I show bellow the
lines from Xorg.0.log that refer to NVIDIA. I thank you in advance.


(II) LoadModule: "glx"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
(II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org Server Extension
(II) NVIDIA GLX Module 195.36.31 Thu Jun 3 08:59:25 PDT 2010
(II) Loading extension GLX

(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so
(II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org Video Driver
(II) NVIDIA dlloader X Driver 195.36.31 Thu Jun 3 08:27:29 PDT 2010
(II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 02@00:00:0

(**) Apr 13 00:46:42 NVIDIA(0): Enabling RENDER acceleration
(II) Apr 13 00:46:42 NVIDIA(0): Support for GLX with the Damage and Composite X extensions is
(II) Apr 13 00:46:42 NVIDIA(0): enabled.
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce 8400 GS (G86) at PCI:2:0:0 (GPU-0)
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Memory: 524288 kBytes
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 60.86.4a.00.23
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Detected PCI Express Link width: 16X
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Interlaced video modes are supported on this GPU
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s) on GeForce 8400 GS at PCI:2:0:0:
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): LG 710E (CRT-0)
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): LG 710E (CRT-0): 400.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Assigned Display Device: CRT-0
(==) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0):
(==) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): No modes were requested; the default mode "nvidia-auto-select"
(==) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): will be used as the requested mode.
(==) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0):
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Validated modes:
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): "nvidia-auto-select"
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Virtual screen size determined to be 1024 x 768
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): DPI set to (78, 78); computed from "UseEdidDpi" X config
(--) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): option
(==) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Enabling 32-bit ARGB GLX visuals.
(--) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA: Using 768.00 MB of virtual memory for indirect memory access.
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Initialized GPU GART.
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "nvidia-auto-select"
(II) Loading extension NV-GLX
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Initialized OpenGL Acceleration
(==) NVIDIA(0): Disabling shared memory pixmaps
(II) Apr 13 00:46:43 NVIDIA(0): Initialized X Rendering Acceleration
(==) NVIDIA(0): Backing store disabled
(==) NVIDIA(0): Silken mouse enabled
(==) NVIDIA(0): DPMS enabled


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#1 Bob Proulx
April 13th, 2012 - 03:30 pm ET | Report spam

Eduardo Bearzoti wrote:
Video card (lspci output):
nvidia Corporation G86[GeForce 8400 GS] (rev a1)



I have a system with the same graphics chip and it is working fine for
me at 1600x1200 with the default driver. I am a little embarrassed to
say that after looking at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file I am not sure
which driver it is actually using. I do not have any special drivers
(e.g. nouveau or nvidia) installed. It has been fine and I haven't
needed to look at it. It worked out of the box by default.

when attempting to login trough gdm3, the whole system freezes again.



Since you are reporting system freezes I am concerned that this may be
a ram problem. If I were looking at this I would install memtest86+
as a bootable system. Then reboot into memtest and let it run through
several cycles to verify that you are not having a system memory
problem.

# apt-get install memtest86+
...
Setting up memtest86+ (4.10-1.1) ...
Generating grub.cfg ...
...
Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.bin

That will configure grub automatically for a bootable memtest
environment. Reboot and it can be selected.

If I ever find a problem with ram then I am always very thankful
because replacing ram is pretty inexpensive and a much easier thing to
do than most other repairs or chasing down driver problems.

Good luck!

Bob





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