nVidia Graphics Card, a Hit or Miss on Each New Distro Release

Has anyone gotten their nVidia graphics card (GeForce 8600 GT) to work on Fedora 11 x86_64? It's been a literal hit or miss on every release of Fedora. I started at Fedora 8 and I'm on 11. I got it working on 9, then 10 (after waiting for the right kmod drivers) and Fedora 12 is almost here and I haven't gotten my graphics card to work to it's full 3D capacity.

After I install kmod-nvidia and reboot the machine, my monitor literally loses its signal. I would then have to reboot into runlevel 3 and manually change the x configuration file back to "nv".

I've been to the forums, IRC and filed a bug report with RPMFusion and RedHat. No one could give me a solution. What happened between Fedora 10 and 11!?

I missed out on playing World of Warcraft on my Linux-box or any other graphic-intensive game.

FergatROn

Posted 2009-10-02T13:14:13.810

Reputation: 31

If your current installation is working, then don't upgrade distros until you know it's working. – EmmEff – 2009-10-02T14:33:23.743

you shouldn't need to reboot just to get into runlevel 3, or a commandprompt for that matter. Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or F[2-5]) should get you to a login prompt on a commandline terminal. from there you can modify your x config, and restart X or GDM (although if you're unable to rmmod the kernel module you will need to reboot). – quack quixote – 2010-01-04T23:19:41.367

Answers

Nothing happened between Fedora 10 and 11, besides the usual updating of packages etc, kernels, etc.

The real question you should be asking, is what happened to the Nvidia driver package? Unfortunately, no easy answer to that one.

Welcome to Linux graphics hell.

caliban

Posted 2009-10-02T13:14:13.810

Reputation: 18 979

1nvidia driver is closed-source, so Linux shall not be blamed for the graphics hell. – geek – 2009-10-02T15:29:39.447

@geek totally, dude. – caliban – 2009-10-02T15:42:31.980

If it works fine on Windows, but not on linux, then you only have linux to blame – Josh Hunt – 2009-11-08T11:49:10.643

Because the nVidia kernel module is built specifically for each kernel release, you need to download and install a new nVidia kernel module each time your kernel is updated. If you suddenly are confronted with a non-responsive blank screen after a reboot, this is probably what has happened.

The easiest fix in this case is to log in to one of the virtual consoles, downgrade the system to runlevel 2, remove the old kmod-nvidia-* package, and install the new kmod-nvidia-* package followed by a reboot.

Alternatively you can let your system always automatically download and install the latest nVidia kernel module whenever a new kernel is downloaded by simply installing a meta-package called kmod-nvidia-* instead of the kernel specific package.

Note that the nVidia drivera are usually not available for a few days after a new kernel is released.

fpmurphy

Posted 2009-10-02T13:14:13.810

Reputation: 1 260