Major probelm with video

[nate]

This has to be one of the strangest bugs I've come across.

I installed the NVIDIA drivers for my machine as per Pizzasgood's instructions - all good. No problem. Also keeps settings on reboot.

However, I turned on my laptop tonight and X.org doesn't work. The script to start X on boot fails, and when I try to reconfigure X.org using the wizard, it fails, saying something about buffer overrun errors.

Just before the xwin tries to start, a whole stack of messages i've never seen before come up, to the effect of "WARNING: /lib/modules/2.6/net/ipw2200.ko is not an elf object'. This happens for about 30 modules, from wireless to video to mouse to alsa and oss sound. Also, after that, its says "depmod: segmentation fault".

In the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file, i have a line that loads the NVIDIA drivers on boot:

Code: Select all

/sbin/depmod -aq

When I try to run depmod, i come up with the same strange elf object (whatever they are) error messages as before. When I run the xorgwizard, and select xvesa, X starts and is fine - but not for me as I have a widescreen laptop and without NVIDIA the screen is distorted.

I even tried editing the xorg.conf file and rebooting, but to no avail. The only thing I can think of that may have caused this is that I installed a few dotpups (quake2, bbcnewsticker, abiword-spell-AU) and i increased the size of the pup_save.3fs file from 111MB to 175MB using the tool in Puppy.

This is very baffling, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Nathan

[nate]

anyone?

[MU]

I can't really help you, as I have no nvidia-card.

Just 2 very vague ideas:

1)
Does that happen too with a fresh pup_save.3fs?
I'm not 100% shure, that all bugs in unionfs have gone, though Puppy2 runs remarkebly stable here at moment.
I would however check that.

2)
from: http://dotpups.de/tests/nvidia/Mark-NVIDIA8756.txt
"This driver package doesn't install any device files. I think the driver creates the device files it needs when it loads ... or it uses udev in some other fashion(?)"

I don't know, if that might have to do with it.

See the textfiles here:
http://dotpups.de/tests/nvidia/

Maybe they contain any valuable information for you.
These are testfiles intended for experienced users, we have no idea if they work or not.

Mark

[nate]

well.. it was working fine after i installed it the first time... and after a few reboots it was working perfectly. I'll try on a new pup_save... but I dont want this happening every couple of reboots.

[tempestuous]

nate,
Are you talking about Puppy 2, and the "legacy" version 7174 nvidia driver? Puppy 2's 2.6 kernel behaves differently to the 2.4 kernel. Apparently the device files created by the nvidia installer are deleted at shutdown.
The workaround is to run the device creation script at each bootup. You should already have this script, /usr/bin/nvidia-makedevices.sh
I attach it in case you don't. gunzip it into /usr/bin Run this script from the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local so that these device files will be in place before X launches.

[nate]

thanks. Will try.