Crappy Graphics in Red Hat

[FungusFeet]

I installed XP, then set it up to dual boot with Red Hat 9 with the included GRUB. This was easy enough for a first time user until I logged in. Graphics are choppy including the busy overlay on the cursor. The "additional" games like Tux Racer don't work. By the way Tux Racer worked before I installed the drivers(which I couldn't have done without some tutorials) for my ti4800, but the framerate was unbearable even on the menu screen. After installing the drivers, those few games (I guess they have better graphics?) don't even open. No error message--nothing. Any help will be appreciated.

P.S. I was dumb and didn't set up a swap partition. Could this account for sh!tty graphics?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I doubt swap is the problem.

X in Redhat has always been choppy for me as well, I'm not sure what their problem is. But needless to say, something is obviously wrong with your nvidia driver if games won't even run.

Welcome to open-source graphics. It sucks. And until the video hardware manufacturers play along, it'll most likely not change much.

 

[drag]

See if your drivers are loaded correctly. I assume that theys are the ones from nvidia's website? Tuxrace is smooth for me and I am on a geforce2

log in as root.

do:
lsmod |grep nvidia

That should list the nvidia driver.
If it isn't their try:

modprobe nvidia

If that doesn't work then the drivers aren't installed correctly.

then you need to edit your config file. Sometimes it's /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

If you aren't sure go to /var/log/ directory and see the xfree86 logs. It should say in there.

Also look for any errors.

Make sure that the config is using "nvidia" instead of "nv"

Make sure that in the loadable module section you have
load "glx"

It their and any references to DRI are commented out (put a # in the beginning of line).

Once that is all done then type:

telinit 3
then
telinit 5
to restart X (maybe telinit 4, instead of 5, I forget)

Hopefully that makes sure that everything is working just fine. If your using the latest drivers from Nvidia, use the next older version, sometimes newest versions are a bit dodgy for a while.

Also check out the "top" command from the terminal to see your memory usage. If you have around 128megs or less it could be that your running out of ram, although that should be enough. Ideally you should have 256 or 512 megs of ram for any modern desktop setup.

In a healthy system you should be running close to full usage for RAM even if you have alot, but have 60megs or so free. Also if you have a lot of the swap file being used it's showing that your running out of RAM to much. A few megs is OK, but any more then that and your going to chug a little. Ideally you should have zero swap usage, but your going to need over 512megs for that to have unlimited programs open and not run into the swap.

So you should probably have a swap partition. It's just cheap insurance. I would always have a swap, however if you have over a gig of ram I would say that you can get away without it.

Also make sure that there aren't any programs screwing up in the background. Mozilla with java stuff often won't shut off correctly and use up resources in the background. Look at the
ps -aux |less
to see what programs are being used.

To kill a program use
killall progname
command. If that doesn't work after a couple tries then
kill -9 PIDnumber
(were PID number is indicated thru the "ps aux" command)
drag 20714 5.3 12.2 50588 31356 ? S 15:01 1:01 /usr/lib/mozilla-bin
The PID number would be 20714.
You can also do this from top, when you press k.

If there are to many to tell whats going on do "telinit 3" to shut off X and see what's not shutting off. Also top will tell you system usage. If you want a gui system monitor "GKrellm" is VERY nice to have running on a desktop. That will help you tune your system.

 

[Zelmo3]

I won't pretend to be as proficient with Linux as drag, but be sure to check the appendices near the end of nVidia's INSTALL file (or was it README?). There's some stuff back there about troubleshooting GLX and checking that the driver installed all the right files in the right places.
Despite the pessimism of folks like BingBongWongFooey, I've had pretty good experiences with graphics in Linux (which are not always open source, as in the case of nVidia and ATI accelerated drivers) thanks largely to the manufacturers' support.

 

[Drift3r]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I doubt swap is the problem.

X in Redhat has always been choppy for me as well, I'm not sure what their problem is. But needless to say, something is obviously wrong with your nvidia driver if games won't even run.

Welcome to open-source graphics. It sucks. And until the video hardware manufacturers play along, it'll most likely not change much.

Nvidia's and ATI's drivers are both closed source. Nvidia's driver and it's packaging system works for me on Mandrake. Of course I read the Reame.txt provided by Nvidia throughly and have gained experince with these drivers. The only problem I ever had was with Fedora which I easliy fixed, and with getting 2.6 drivers for Mandrake which I got from NV-New's website. I have never gotten ATI's drivers working properly due to the fact that I run a KT400 mobo and they have issues with this board on this computer.

P.S. Working 2.6 drivers of Nvidia's latest drivers can be fetched via this link.

http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/linux-2.6/

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Drift3r

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I doubt swap is the problem.

X in Redhat has always been choppy for me as well, I'm not sure what their problem is. But needless to say, something is obviously wrong with your nvidia driver if games won't even run.

Welcome to open-source graphics. It sucks. And until the video hardware manufacturers play along, it'll most likely not change much.

Nvidia's and ATI's drivers are both closed source.

I know. My point was that the open source graphics situation is crap. Even the open-source-with-closed-drivers situation is nearly as crappy (idealism aside), just because the drivers require unnecessary legwork, and are often problematic.

Nvidia's driver and it's packaging system works for me on Mandrake. Of course I read the Reame.txt provided by Nvidia throughly and have gained experince with these drivers.

That's kind of lame though. Why should you need "experience" just to install a driver? Better yet, why should you even have to install the driver? Ideally it would be distributed with the windowing system and/or the OS, and not require user intervention.

 

[drag]

Yep. Ideally that's what happens with open source drivers.

The Distros are free to do some error corrections if need be and then they send them out into the wild to be installed as default as the normal drivers.

It's nice to have good hardware support. If you carefully plan your hardware purchase you can pop a CD in, do a install and pretty much automaticly have your system configured and optimized. The installer situations and setups are much better then Windows stuff, but main obstical is hardware manufacturers refusing to let open source people help them out.

For almost every peice of PC hardware the situation for Linux support has drasticly improved, however the big exeption is video cards.

It's realy cool when you have a computer that is fully supported with open source drivers. The machine becomes much more flexible and more powerfull since you can more easily talor it to fit a situation. If I want to set up something special (like mabye a 15 display computer setup with bunches of PCI dual head video cards), all I have to do is learn how to handle that many displays, now if their is a bug then I can work with the developers and get it resolved. However if it's Nvidia's closed source drivers I am limited to simply waiting for the next release and hoping that they bothered to fix it.

Leave the kernel patching, driver compiling and tweaking to people who want the best ultimate performance and latest software inovations. It's nice to get a new install going and having it "just work".

Some other companies are learning the value of open source software. No longer having to pay royalties to other companies for software bits and peices needed for the drivers, people willing to deal with bugs and problems, in order to get the features that they want and better performance. Then the normal person, who may not care about a 10% increase in FPS, or better anti-alias may still be able to benifit from it later down the road.

One good example is drivers for XFS filing system. SGI was a classic Unix company that made workstations for 3-d graphic developement and is the classic setup for making movie special effects. However Linux is getting more and more popular in that area. SGI wanted to use Linux to cash in on this trend, however linux needed a high-performance filing system that is able to handle 4+ gigabyte files easily. So they released XFS support for linux open source, it worked, the kernel developers liked it and worked on it will SGI and now it is incorporated into the 2.6 kernel. Now everyone benifits from it and SGI can enjoy higher performance and cheaper workstations/render farms for their clients.

Now instead of SGI companing about the continually changing "API" in the linux kernel and having to fight it and only supporting kernel 2.4.16 in "Redhat 8.0, and SuSE 7.2". They get the benifits of code changes and increase performance, and universal support from almost all Linux OSes. (well in the near future, most current Distros require the patched kernel, but some support it by default)

Open source drivers are important, not just because people are "Yo! Open source RULEz"