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Switching to Linux

E

EvanB

Senior member
Alright, so I have used windows for a long time, nearly every iteration since its release and I have recently decided that I want to switch over as much as I can to Linux (save gaming). So I am going to set up a dual boot system on:

A64 3200+
MSI Neo, nforce 3
6800gt

And I will be using the onboard sound and LAN (assuming I can get it to work).

So far, I installed SuSE 9.1 and cannot get the chipset and video drivers to work. I downloaded the Nvidia Linux drivers and followed their instructions ("sh NFORCE-Linux-1.0..." etc at terminal), but I can't configure them. They install fine, but the computer doesn't recognize they are there. It found and installed a Netgear Wireless adapter, but even with the drivers, it doesn't automatically detect the chipset features. I don't know how to manaully add a network card or configure the drivers and Nvidia's documentation didn't lead me anywhere.

I originally wanted to use Fedora core 2, but every time I tried installing it it got stuck on the "loading sbin/loader" command and cant install. I would still rather use this if someone knows the solution to this problem. I googled it and came up with that it might be the usb, so i removed all my usb devices and still encountered the problem.

I would really like to use Linux, but at the moment I am stuck still using Windows for everything, as internet access is essential.

Thanks in advance to all those that replay and/or help.

Evan
 
When you install the nvidia driver you have to edit your X11.conf file and change the driver from nv to nvidia for it to use them.
 
Dammit. Why do people insist on buying nvidia motherboards?? 🙁
They cause so much trouble, Via has proper support for Linux, the come working out of the box 90% of the time.

Check out nvidia's forums for help with your ethernet (and video). I had a nforce2 based board for a short while. I got the ethernet stuff working fine, but it's a pain to deal with. Especially when using any other board or ethernet device you don't have to put up with that crap, normally.

The "easy" way out is simply to disable the on-board ethernet and go out and buy the cheapest pci ethernet card you can find. Go to newegg and you can find one that works for less then 4 dollars. Or get a nice intel or 3com one, whatever. A local store should have ethernet adapters for under 8 bucks.

For the netgear wireless, I don't know. Netgear makes many different wireless adapters, you'll have to be more specific on the model.

After you get the video drivers installed just go and edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Find the settings for your video card, and change one line:
What you'll find is something that looks sort of like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Geforce FX"
Driver "nv"
EndSection

Probably with some extra options and such in there. Change
Driver "nv"
over to
Driver "nvidia"

Just remember to backup your configuration file so if you edit it incorrectly you can just copy the old one back over it.

And that will be that. You may have to go "modprobe nvidia" to get the nvidia driver to load into memory. To make that perminate you have to add a line to /etc/modules.conf. It talks about that in nvidia's video driver documentation.

I tried helping people out with Nvidia motherboards before, but it's so discouraging. With newbies you realy need to know the step by step, since everything is so new and confusing for them. With no internet access it's a pain because you can't even open up a text-based webbrowser such as lynx or links to go and find information if you break your configuration.
 
Originally posted by: HappyCracker
When I had Gentoo installed on my NF7-S, Love Sources took care of everything for me. It's a kernel patchset to the mm- patchset
Click to expand...

I've got gentoo on the A7N8X deluxe, and I use love as well. Granted, it gets sound working, but nvidia's sound support blows ass.
 
i use a nfII board... it was a pain to install the NIC... so i just disabled it and popped in my good ol intel pro.

i heard the nfIII is one of the most PITA boards to set up for linux. i guess nvidia doesnt care too much about linux support yet.

 
I think thats what I'll do. I have an intel pro 1000 sitting around here, that should be easier to install, yeah?

And no ideas about the sbin/loader thing?
 
Dammit. Why do people insist on buying nvidia motherboards??
Click to expand...

Damn, that sucks. An entire segment of the market discouraged from using Linux. I don't profess to know the details...is this a Nvidia problem or a Linux problem?
 
Originally posted by: STaSh
Dammit. Why do people insist on buying nvidia motherboards??
Click to expand...

Damn, that sucks. An entire segment of the market discouraged from using Linux. I don't profess to know the details...is this a Nvidia problem or a Linux problem?
Click to expand...

the motherboard situation is definately a Nvidia problem. They are using hardware that is slightly modified to work with their chipsets. For instance for most nforce2 boards they use a modified realtek ethernet chip. This has nice opensource Linux drivers for years and years, but nvdia modified it slightly for some reason. As a side effect it doesn't work with Linux's drivers, even it so similar that it gets misconfigured as the real deal (which of course doesn't work). Nvidia acts like their setup is soo 733t that the couldn't possibly help to make Free drivers that would work.

The situation with the video cards is quite a bit more complicated. There are problems with how X is currently setup that makes driver developement difficult. (you need to have 2 sets of drivers right now, one for X11 2-d stuff, and completely seperate OpenGL 3-d stuff)

Remember back in the Geforce1/2 days when Nvidia trumped ATI with new universal nvidia drivers? I got a 15% increase in performance from newer drivers alone. Nvidia remembers that and one of there of big things over ATI is driver quality.

So you have a combination of platform limitations and marketing pressure that keeps them from making good OSS drivers. But with their motherboards they have no excuse.
 
Originally posted by: EvanB
I think thats what I'll do. I have an intel pro 1000 sitting around here, that should be easier to install, yeah?

And no ideas about the sbin/loader thing?
Click to expand...

Could be a APM, ACPI or APCI issue. Sometimes hardware doesn't work well with Linux's power management stuff and will freeze up when being probed or getting drivers loaded.

Go into your BIOS and make sure that you have non-PNP OS (plug-n-play) settings checked. Turn off any power management features in the BIOS. Assign a IRQ to VGA. Maybe disable hardware that isn't going to be used (such as the parrellel and serial ports if you aren't going to use them).

Stuff like that. If it works then you can go back in and turn on feature by feature until you find out specificly causes the lockup.

When starting the bootloader see if you can edit your kernel parameters or at least add arguments. Try adding:

acpi=off apm=off

(so if the bootloader says type linux to pick out a kernel, you would type out "linux acpi=off apm=off", that sort of thing. There should be instructions for passing kernel agruments)

to turn off the power management features. Once you get it working try turning apm on or acpi (prefereable) on.

If that doesn't help check out Fedora's forums. here Intallation help is usually given a priority and they have a forums specificly setup to use it.
 
Originally posted by: drag
For instance for most nforce2 boards they use a modified realtek ethernet chip. This has nice opensource Linux drivers for years and years, but nvdia modified it slightly for some reason. As a side effect it doesn't work with Linux's drivers, even it so similar that it gets misconfigured as the real deal (which of course doesn't work). Nvidia acts like their setup is soo 733t that the couldn't possibly help to make Free drivers that would work.
Click to expand...

I honestly haven't had any issues with nVidia's 10/100 ethernet chip under Linux in ~2 years. I learned quickly to download the latest drivers before installing the OS, but installing them was relatively painless.

Most of the latest distros now include a GPL'ed driver that the OSS community made by reverse engineering the hardware. It is called (appropriately) ForcedEth (an interesting read) and ethernet works without hassle.

Unfortunately, the Gb ethernet chip is an entirely different situation and once again it is difficult/impossible to use the latest hardware under Linux.

The situation with the video cards is quite a bit more complicated. There are problems with how X is currently setup that makes driver developement difficult. (you need to have 2 sets of drivers right now, one for X11 2-d stuff, and completely seperate OpenGL 3-d stuff)
Click to expand...

You lost me with this. I only use one driver (61.11) for both 2D and 3D. It is true that there are 2 different drivers available for nVidia's graphics chips (one is a GPL driver strictly for 2D, and is included with all distros, the other is closed source, provides 2D and 3D, and you must either download that directly from nVidia or purchase a retail Linux distro), but you don't use them concurrently.
 
Intel writes GPL/BSD licensed drivers. I believe 3com releases documentation, Marvell apparently releases enough documentation for drivers to be written. Adaptec released docs. Linksys uses tulip clone chips (ADMtek). ADMtek releases docs on atleast some of their other chips. AMD has released docs for the LANCE adapters. Broadcom (surprisingly) released enough documentation for a driver. DEC, back in the day, apparently released enough documentation for a driver. Realtek admitted to having crappy chipsets- er released documentation. SiS released documentation. TI released documentation. VIA, of course, released documentation. There are a few others I could list if you're interested, and I could go into the Gigabit cards (yeah, those were just the 10 and 10/100 cards). 😉

There is no point in nVidia keeping their docs such a secret. GPL drivers aren't enough, proper documentation would be. Reverse engineering is just ridiculous.

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser
Originally posted by: drag
The situation with the video cards is quite a bit more complicated. There are problems with how X is currently setup that makes driver developement difficult. (you need to have 2 sets of drivers right now, one for X11 2-d stuff, and completely seperate OpenGL 3-d stuff)
Click to expand...

You lost me with this. I only use one driver (61.11) for both 2D and 3D. It is true that there are 2 different drivers available for nVidia's graphics chips (one is a GPL driver strictly for 2D, and is included with all distros, the other is closed source, provides 2D and 3D, and you must either download that directly from nVidia or purchase a retail Linux distro), but you don't use them concurrently.
Click to expand...

AFAIK there is no GPLed driver for nVidia graphics cards.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
nv?
Click to expand...

Not if you want 3D.
Click to expand...

Either way, it's still not GPLed.

I did find the license interesting though:
|* Copyright 2003 NVIDIA, Corporation. All rights reserved. *|
|* *|
|* NOTICE TO USER: The source code is copyrighted under U.S. and *|
|* international laws. Users and possessors of this source code are *|
|* hereby granted a nonexclusive, royalty-free copyright license to *|
|* use this code in individual and commercial software. *|
|* *|
|* Any use of this source code must include, in the user documenta- *|
|* tion and internal comments to the code, notices to the end user *|
|* as follows: *|
|* *|
|* Copyright 2003 NVIDIA, Corporation. All rights reserved. *|
Click to expand...

There's more there (Warranty, and some notice to US government users...), but that's the important stuff. 😉
 
Whatever, the GPL rocks the house. If it wasn't for that people would be releasing closed source versions of Linux like they did with BSD and OS X, and parts of Windows NT/2000/XP. You don't need to close off open source software in order to benifit from it.

And I should of known that the "nv" driver is from the XFree86 project. And they aren't GPL'd, but use their own brand of BSD-style liscence. Didn't know nv itself came from Nvidia though. They probably released a reference driver years and years ago and it's been modified to keep up with the newer versions and that silly "I made this" notice has been drug along ever since. I wouldn't be suprised if very little of the actual code in nv is nvidia anymore, not that I know anything about it.

But those card companies are still pretty much using the same 2-d part of the gpu core that existed back in the original geforce 256 days. Virtually no work has been done on it. That's one of the reasons people want to move to the OpenGL stuff.

I'll have to look it up. 😉
 
Originally posted by: drag
Whatever, the GPL rocks the house. If it wasn't for that people would be releasing closed source versions of Linux like they did with BSD and OS X, and parts of Windows NT/2000/XP. You don't need to close off open source software in order to benifit from it.
Click to expand...

Do we need this silly debate? Here? Again? 😛

Don't get me wrong, I like debating it. The GPLers are so much fun to mess with, I just don't think we need it at the moment. 😉

Even I'm willing to admit the GPL has its advantages over free licenses, in certain circumstances.

And I should of known that the "nv" driver is from the XFree86 project. And they aren't GPL'd, but use their own brand of BSD-style liscence. Didn't know nv itself came from Nvidia though. They probably released a reference driver years and years ago and it's been modified to keep up with the newer versions and that silly "I made this" notice has been drug along ever since. I wouldn't be suprised if very little of the actual code in nv is nvidia anymore, not that I know anything about it.

But those card companies are still pretty much using the same 2-d part of the gpu core that existed back in the original geforce 256 days.

I'll have to look it up. 😉
Click to expand...

If you find some history or something, let me know. Might be interesting. CVSweb It's openbsd's CVSweb, but it gives you the path for looking in xfree86's cvsweb. 😉
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
The driver can still be DSFG free and be copyright nVidia.
Click to expand...

DSFG? My mind is blanking, but I'm thinking I know that. 😛

From the part of the license I posted, it's as free as most of the XFree86 stuff was before the license change.
 
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