20070823 nvidia 6200tc on fedora core 6 - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: nvidia 6200TC on Fedora Core 6 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/08/23/nvidia-6200tc-on-fedora-core-6/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 657 created: 2007/08/23 06:45:00 created_gmt: 2007/08/23 06:45:00 comment_status: open post_name: nvidia-6200tc-on-fedora-core-6 status: publish post_type: post

nvidia 6200TC on Fedora Core 6

I’ve been running the proprietary Nvidia Linux driver for awhile now, but recently had a couple of programs crash on me (taking my X session with them). One of those apps was Google Earth, whose forums all pointed the finger at the video driver.

No surprise there. What I was experiencing was pretty obviously a driver issue. I’ve got a Nvidia 6200TC in my main workstation, which replaced the shipping ATI 600X card almost a year ago when I gave up trying to get ATI’s proprietary drivers to work correctly with CentOS 4.

After doing some tweaking on xorg.conf and failing to see any change, I decided to try de-installing the proprietary Nvidia driver and go back to the open source x.org nv driver for X11. After backing up my existing xorg.conf, I ran the Nvidia installer with the “–uninstall” switch and removed the driver and it’s companion kernel module. I then rebooted and when X failed to start, allowed the the system to automatically configure.

Although I got everything working again and was able to start Google Earth, my graphics were really S-L-O-W. Doing a glxinfo revealed that direct rendering was not on, and glxgears was running at tortoise-like speed. Google Earth was almost unusable because of the time it took to render each change.

A few hours later, after alot of Googling around for advice on these kinds of issues, I decided to try installing the proprietary Nvidia driver from the RPMForge repository, called nvidia-x11-drv. On my first attempt, X failed to start after reboot because yum had grabbed an old version of dkms from the related Dries repository. I “retired” dries.repo, removed both the nvidia driver and dkms, and then installed the latest dkms from RPMForge. Then I rebooted the machine for good measure. Once it was back up (with the restored X desktop), I then re-installed the nvidia driver package from RPMForge and rebooted.

When the machine finally came back up, voila! After running some checks using glxinfo and xvinfo, I was satisfied that I was indeed running the latest proprietary driver from Nvidia, which supports not only direct rendering, but also 3D graphics.

Google Earth now ran splendidly, which it should, given the 6200TC ’s 400 MHz GeForce VPU gives and 512 Mb effective RAM (256 Mb on board, the rest from shared memory). Of course glxgears reported “only” 2300 fps, but I could live with that.

The nice thing about loading the driver from yum is that the next time the kernel changes RPMForge should already have a new package with an updated kernel module ready to go. Now I need to go to bed so I can get up for work in 4 hours.