Can't install nvidia drivers

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 19 December 2011 18:32:56 Kevin Martin wrote:
> > From the driver page on the nVidia website for your laptop video card:
> > Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver
> > Version: 290.10
> 
> So after working on this all afternoon with Lawrence, it turned out that we
> needed to fall back to the 280.13 version of the nVidia akmod from F15 to
> get it to work.  With the 290.10 and the 285.05.09 we kept seeing this in
> the Xorg.5.log file (don't know why it was creating the .5 log file but
> that's another problem for another time):
> 
> [    42.538] (**) NVIDIA(0): Enabling 2D acceleration
> [    43.913] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to get supported display device(s)
> [    43.933] (WW) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to query OR info 0x24
> [    43.935] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU Quadro FX 2500M (G71GL) at PCI:1:0:0
> (GPU-0)

IIRC, in one of the previous incarnations of this particular thread, someone 
somewhere mentioned that this is actually a bug in the version 290 of the 
nVidia drivers. I remember looking at the bugreport to nVidia (lost the link, 
sorry...), and it was recognized as a bug and also closed as FIXED by nVidia. 
Of course, the new version of the driver with this fix is yet to be released by 
nVidia, and in the meantime users that are being hit by this were advised to 
downgrade to version 280.

The problem was that nobody on the list could walk Lawrence through the 
downgrading process (as you have probably found out, it's not exactly a thing 
a newbie would be able to do easily).

> Going back to the 280.13 version fixed this.  We also added the following to
> the xorg.conf file (again, don't know if we needed this but it was
> suggested in a forum entry on another forum and we tried it *before* not
> trying it and since the driver worked after this we didn't try to revert
> this):
> 
> Section "ServerFlags"
>     Option        "AIGLX" "on"
>     Option      "ignoreABI"
> EndSection

The AIGLX option is a good thing if it works, keep it. I wouldn't know about 
the ignoreABI option, but maybe it is necessary for the downgraded driver. 

Lawrence should keep in mind that he should update his driver to the latest 
version as soon as it comes out of nVidia, and that the issue he is having is 
probably going to go away on its own... ;-) In the meantime, he should keep 
using the 280 driver, and probably keep running the current version of the 
kernel, until the new driver arrives.

Best, :-)
Marko