Hi,
I'm installing Fedora-13 on a Dell E6410 laptop. This has an NVidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics card. The install goes fine .
When I boot with the "nomodeset" kernel boot parameter I only get 800x600 resolution.
If I leave out the "nomodeset" parameter I get a blank screen.
Does anybody have the magic incantations to get this graphics card recognised with reasonable resolution.
I've tried with the live CD and get a blank screen also.
Thanks,
Tony
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 10:32 +0100, Tony Molloy wrote:
Hi,
I'm installing Fedora-13 on a Dell E6410 laptop. This has an NVidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics card. The install goes fine .
When I boot with the "nomodeset" kernel boot parameter I only get 800x600 resolution.
If I leave out the "nomodeset" parameter I get a blank screen.
Does anybody have the magic incantations to get this graphics card recognised with reasonable resolution.
I've tried with the live CD and get a blank screen also.
Thanks,
Tony
iommu=soft
will get it going. The newer kernels (2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64) have fixed the bug that caused the screen to go blank so the 'iommu=soft' is not needed after you get updated.
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 06:54 -0500, Brian Millett wrote:
iommu=soft
will get it going. The newer kernels (2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64)
Is this actually a 64-bit machine? So far I have not been able to get the x86+64 DVD to load. I get a blank screen right after the ISOLINUX title.
--Greg
On Tuesday 24 August 2010 15:30:20 Greg Woods wrote:
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 06:54 -0500, Brian Millett wrote:
iommu=soft
will get it going. The newer kernels (2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64)
Is this actually a 64-bit machine? So far I have not been able to get the x86+64 DVD to load. I get a blank screen right after the ISOLINUX title.
--Greg
Sorry for being so late with my reply I was off work sick for a few days.
Yep this is a 64bit laptop. I'm using the x64 netinstall.iso CD to boot
I'll try the x64 DVD and let you know how I get on.
Thanks,
Tony
On Tuesday 24 August 2010 15:30:20 Greg Woods wrote:
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 06:54 -0500, Brian Millett wrote:
iommu=soft
will get it going. The newer kernels (2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64)
Is this actually a 64-bit machine? So far I have not been able to get the x86+64 DVD to load. I get a blank screen right after the ISOLINUX title.
--Greg
I got the x64 DVD to run anaconda OK. I didn't do the install as I had it already installed.
Thanks,
Tony
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 06:54 -0500, Brian Millett wrote:
iommu=soft
will get it going.
This did not work for me. After it goes through all the daemon startups, it gives a screen with a lot of crazy colors across the top, and alt-F2 brings up a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The system will not respond to the keyboard other than to switch VTs. The only way to get the system to boot properly to graphical mode, that I have found, is to use the "nomodeset" boot parameter, but then it won't do anything better then 800x600.
Even worse, it appears that the latest Linux version of the proprietary nvidia driver does not support this chip. It is listed as GT218 and not on the list of supported chips at the Nvidia web site. Trying to use this driver produces a message in Xorg.0.log that the NVIDIA chip could not be initialized.
Has anyone actually gotten Fedora 13 with X to run properly on one of these things? Right now mine is a paperweight. I'd try Ubuntu but I have no reason to expect it would be any better; this doesn't really look like a Fedora-specific issue, although a workaround might be.
--Greg
I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work. There is something about the recent kernels; I can't get it to work at anywhere near the resolution it is capable of with either nouveau or the Nvidia proprietary driver.
I did get Fedora 12 to work. It was a convoluted process. The installer worked OK using an external monitor. I never could get X to boot properly after that under nouveau, with either the LCD display or the external monitor. I got a blank screen on the LCD and a warning from the monitor that this timing could not be displayed. So what I ended up doing was booting non-graphically, installing the Nvidia driver, then starting X. With a bit of fiddling with nvidia-settings, I am *finally* able to use X at the full LCD resolution (1440x990).
Using F12 instead of F13 is an acceptable workaround for now, but of course sooner or later I will need to move forward. I may actually give the F14 beta a try just to see if it will work. Does anyone know what it is about the recent kernels? nouveau won't work post-install even with "nomodeset", and the Nvidia driver will install but fails to initialize the chip when X is started (I just get an error to that effect in Xorg.0.log).
--Greg
On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 09:51 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work.
I did finally get it installed, and it was a convoluted process :-)
My first problem was that I was using what I thought was an install DVD, but turned out to be a live DVD. Also, these machines really are 64-bit machines; I was trying to install the i386 version (my understanding is that this should be possible but it isn't the best choice for these systems).
The install DVD would boot fine and run through the install process, but the system would not boot graphically after the install, even using "nomodeset". What I had to do was boot non-graphically, install the NVIDIA driver, modify grub.conf to specify "rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset", and then finally I could boot into the graphical login screen and everything mostly works. At some point I managed to totally bork the system where many services (including syslog) failed to start. This was immediately after I ran all 500 or so updates, but I had been making other changes as well so I'm not sure what really happened. I ended up doing a reinstall, this time specifying the Fedora and Fedora Update repositories. This produced a working system with all updates already in place.
I say "mostly works" because I have not been able to get the screen to replicate on both the laptop display and the external monitor (NVIDIA calls this "TwinView" in one place in nvidia-settings, and "clones" in another). I fiddled with the nvidia-settings for quite a while and could never get this to work. On my previous Dell Latitude D520 laptop, it was possible to get the screens to replicate with the resolution of the laptop screen (1024x768). This problem could well be due to the fact that the resolution of this display is 1440x990, which may not be natively supported by either of the external monitors I have tried to use. At some point I will try reducing the laptop display resolution to 1024x768 and seeing if it will replicate the screens then (I probably wouldn't choose to use it in that mode but it would be interesting to know if it would work, could be useful for presentations with projectors).
Right now it does work with separate screens, but this mode requires me to be able to see the laptop display, as that is the only place that I can start applications (I have yet to figure out how to create a GNOME panel on the external monitor X screen), Once started, the window can be dragged over to the external monitor screen. This works, but it's painful to use, at least for me.
As an aside, the screens do replicate just fine under Windows 7. I suspect the Dell-provided W7 driver is doing some scaling for the external display that the nvidia Linux driver doesn't.
--Greg
On Thursday 26 August 2010 18:12:30 Greg Woods wrote:
On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 09:51 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work.
I did finally get it installed, and it was a convoluted process :-)
Following your suggestions I've also got it working at 1440x900
What I did was booted it non-graphically, did a full update so I had the latest kernel. Install the nVidia driver from the rpmfusion repos
yum install akmod-nvidia
ran nvidia-xconfigs to generate a new xorg.conf file.
Then it worked.
Thank You,
The laptop is gone out my door now to the lecturer who owns it. Why didn't he but a E6510 like the rest of us ;-)
Tony
My first problem was that I was using what I thought was an install DVD, but turned out to be a live DVD. Also, these machines really are 64-bit machines; I was trying to install the i386 version (my understanding is that this should be possible but it isn't the best choice for these systems).
The install DVD would boot fine and run through the install process, but the system would not boot graphically after the install, even using "nomodeset". What I had to do was boot non-graphically, install the NVIDIA driver, modify grub.conf to specify "rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset", and then finally I could boot into the graphical login screen and everything mostly works. At some point I managed to totally bork the system where many services (including syslog) failed to start. This was immediately after I ran all 500 or so updates, but I had been making other changes as well so I'm not sure what really happened. I ended up doing a reinstall, this time specifying the Fedora and Fedora Update repositories. This produced a working system with all updates already in place.
I say "mostly works" because I have not been able to get the screen to replicate on both the laptop display and the external monitor (NVIDIA calls this "TwinView" in one place in nvidia-settings, and "clones" in another). I fiddled with the nvidia-settings for quite a while and could never get this to work. On my previous Dell Latitude D520 laptop, it was possible to get the screens to replicate with the resolution of the laptop screen (1024x768). This problem could well be due to the fact that the resolution of this display is 1440x990, which may not be natively supported by either of the external monitors I have tried to use. At some point I will try reducing the laptop display resolution to 1024x768 and seeing if it will replicate the screens then (I probably wouldn't choose to use it in that mode but it would be interesting to know if it would work, could be useful for presentations with projectors).
Right now it does work with separate screens, but this mode requires me to be able to see the laptop display, as that is the only place that I can start applications (I have yet to figure out how to create a GNOME panel on the external monitor X screen), Once started, the window can be dragged over to the external monitor screen. This works, but it's painful to use, at least for me.
As an aside, the screens do replicate just fine under Windows 7. I suspect the Dell-provided W7 driver is doing some scaling for the external display that the nvidia Linux driver doesn't.
--Greg
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 13:11 +0100, Tony Molloy wrote:
Following your suggestions I've also got it working at 1440x900
What I did was booted it non-graphically, did a full update so I had the latest kernel. Install the nVidia driver from the rpmfusion repos
yum install akmod-nvidia
ran nvidia-xconfigs to generate a new xorg.conf file.
Then it worked.
Thank You,
The laptop is gone out my door now to the lecturer who owns it. Why didn't he but a E6510 like the rest of us ;-)
Good.
Yes, it can be frustrating at times. Good job getting it going.
On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 11:12 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 09:51 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work.
I did finally get it installed, and it was a convoluted process :-)
I say "mostly works" because I have not been able to get the screen to replicate on both the laptop display and the external monitor
I kind of got this to work as well. The problem seems to be that my old laptop was 1024x768, and this resolution is natively supported by the external monitors I have. So there was never any rescaling going on within X, it was within the monitor hardware.
The E6410 screen is 1440x990, a resolution that is not supported natively by either of my monitors (home or work), so I cannot use a cloned display at this resolution. At home, the monitor will support a 1400x1050 resolution, so if I manually set the external monitor to use this resolution (in nvidia-settings), I can then turn "clones" on and get a cloned display. At this resolution, it looks good on the monitor but the bottom of the display goes off the bottom edge of the laptop screen. This doesn't much matter because I normally only want to turn clone mode on when I am using the external monitor, and this will now work at 1400x1050, which is at least better than with my old laptop. The work monitor is older and suckier, so the best I can do cloned is 1024x768. The monitor is capable of 1920x1080, but it is limited in what other resolutions are natively supported.
But by default the laptop screen will come up at full 1440x990 resolution, and I then just have to fire up nvidia-settings to set up the external monitor. It is annoying that it won't go into cloned mode automatically like it did before, but unless I can find a monitor that supports 1440x990 natively, I'm probably stuck with it this way.
--Greg
On Wednesday 25 August 2010 16:51:16 Greg Woods wrote:
I never have been able to get Fedora 13 to work. There is something about the recent kernels; I can't get it to work at anywhere near the resolution it is capable of with either nouveau or the Nvidia proprietary driver.
I did get Fedora 12 to work. It was a convoluted process. The installer worked OK using an external monitor. I never could get X to boot properly after that under nouveau, with either the LCD display or the external monitor. I got a blank screen on the LCD and a warning from the monitor that this timing could not be displayed. So what I ended up doing was booting non-graphically, installing the Nvidia driver, then starting X. With a bit of fiddling with nvidia-settings, I am *finally* able to use X at the full LCD resolution (1440x990).
Using F12 instead of F13 is an acceptable workaround for now, but of course sooner or later I will need to move forward. I may actually give the F14 beta a try just to see if it will work. Does anyone know what it is about the recent kernels? nouveau won't work post-install even with "nomodeset", and the Nvidia driver will install but fails to initialize the chip when X is started (I just get an error to that effect in Xorg.0.log).
--Greg
I will also give the f14-Alpha a try an dsee if it works any better.
Tony
On Tuesday 24 August 2010 23:00:50 Greg Woods wrote:
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 06:54 -0500, Brian Millett wrote:
iommu=soft
will get it going.
This did not work for me. After it goes through all the daemon startups, it gives a screen with a lot of crazy colors across the top, and alt-F2 brings up a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The system will not respond to the keyboard other than to switch VTs. The only way to get the system to boot properly to graphical mode, that I have found, is to use the "nomodeset" boot parameter, but then it won't do anything better then 800x600.
That is exactly my problem. "iommu=soft" did not work "nomodeset" works but I can only get 800x600.
Even worse, it appears that the latest Linux version of the proprietary nvidia driver does not support this chip. It is listed as GT218 and not on the list of supported chips at the Nvidia web site. Trying to use this driver produces a message in Xorg.0.log that the NVIDIA chip could not be initialized.
I'm using the nouveau driver but I did try to install the proprietary nVidia one but it wouldn't install so I can confirm that.
Has anyone actually gotten Fedora 13 with X to run properly on one of these things? Right now mine is a paperweight. I'd try Ubuntu but I have no reason to expect it would be any better; this doesn't really look like a Fedora-specific issue, although a workaround might be.
--Greg
I might have a crack at Ubuntu. I'll try anything to get this machine off my hands right now ;-)
Thanks,
Tony
On Tuesday 24 August 2010 12:54:08 Brian Millett wrote:
On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 10:32 +0100, Tony Molloy wrote:
Hi,
I'm installing Fedora-13 on a Dell E6410 laptop. This has an NVidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics card. The install goes fine .
When I boot with the "nomodeset" kernel boot parameter I only get 800x600 resolution.
If I leave out the "nomodeset" parameter I get a blank screen.
Does anybody have the magic incantations to get this graphics card recognised with reasonable resolution.
I've tried with the live CD and get a blank screen also.
Thanks,
Tony
iommu=soft
will get it going. The newer kernels (2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64) have fixed the bug that caused the screen to go blank so the 'iommu=soft' is not needed after you get updated.
Hi,
Sorry for being so late with my reply but I was off work sick for the last few days.
I tried your suggestion.
I booted with nomodeset set and did a full update to the latest packages.
Linux bleisce2.csis.ul.ie 2.6.33.8-149.fc13.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Aug 17 22:53:15 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I then rebooted with the latest kernel and nomodeset set and got 800x600 resolution.
I then rebooted with iommu=soft set and got a "mistuned TV" screen. You can see the login box in the background and you can actually login but the screen stays like a "mistuned TV"
Thanks,
Tony
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Brian Millett -
Greg Woods -
Tony Molloy