Stripes on screen after installing Fedora

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 10 August 2008, Tim wrote:
>On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 22:53 +0200, Bjørn Ivar Johnsen wrote:
>> I just realized that I have to download a driver to nvidia card
>> specially for Linux!!!
>
>Just FYI, that sort of thing *may* or may not be necessary.  Fedora
>already comes with a driver for many NVidia graphics chipsets, but you
>may have a card that it won't work with, and you may need the closed
>binary NVidia driver maintained by NVidia, themselves.  Which, as far as
>I thought, is maintained more often.
>
>There are some problems with using the NVidia driver, it's a closed
>binary, and you're up a creek without a paddle if it interacts badly
>with your system.  I don't use it on two of my PCs, one because their
>driver is worse (on that PC) than the one that came with Fedora, the
>other PC because the Fedora supplied driver works just fine.

Gotta comment here, Tim.

Yes, and that closed binary from nvidia still restricts you to running kernels 
below 2.6.26 for starters.  But because I wanted to run google's sketchup, 
and it doesn't run correctly on my old radeon 9200SE, I reinstalled a Jaton 
built nvidia GEforce-6200 friday afternoon, along with the latest nvidia 
drivers for it from livna.  Rebooting to 2.6.25-60.fc8, the speed of glxgears 
was doubled, and sketchup ran abeit work window updates were glacial.

I was noticing system freezes of 10-15 seconds though, and early Saturday 
morning it froze except for gkrellm, and I slowly watched the traffic I/O on 
2 pf 3 my hard drives climb until it was reading about 75M/Sec and 40M/Sec 
steady.  X was killable from the keyboard, but that was the last time the 
keyboard worked.  I eventually gave up and hit the reset button followed by 
the power switch, pulled the nvidia card and put the old radeon back in.  On 
bootup it complained about nvidia this and nvidia that, so I had rpm nuke the 
kmod-nvidia stuff and all its deps,  then edited xorg.conf to re-enable the 
ati driver, and then spent the next 3+ hours using amrecover to fix the 
damages to /home and /root before kmail was back among the living, minus of 
course the incoming email between last nights amanda run and the recovery.

This is the 3rd time I've been an unwilling guest of one of he nvidia rodeo's.
Its a known fact that the nvidia drivers are responsible for 40% of the 
windows re-installs, and my use of them has now caused serious HD problems 3 
times, once completely wiping LSN0 of the boot drive clean.  That was an 
interesting recovery, a from the dvd re-install and about a week pulling 
stuff back in from the backups as I discovered they were missing.

FWIW, I also bought an X1650-Pro ATI AGP card last week, but that card had no 
1.5 volt key slot and will not even post on this mobo.  I'll get an RMA 
tomorrow.  It works fine in another machine, making stunningly brilliant 
color.

If anyone knows of an ati card that will work in an 8x rated AGP slot (it will 
need 2 key slots altho my mobo only has one, the 3.3 volt key, or at least it 
seems only those cards with the dual key slots work) and which will run 
googles sketchup6 under wine-1.0, please advise.

OTOH, I'm thinking of a new mobo, if I can find an AMD-64-x4 board with enough 
I/O to run everything here, and do it without an idling 767 engine for 
cooling, that will put me into the PCIe camp and newer video.

One thing is for sure, that is the last time I will install anything designed 
by nvidia that requires the binary blob to work.  That thing scribbles all 
over memory it doesn't own.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Succumb to natural tendencies.  Be hateful and boring.