💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jmccue › computer › slackware › nvidia.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:50:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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Note, When this document was created, My Video card was "nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2)". This applied to my home server.
Well my home server finally bit the dust in 2020, I replaced the power supply and forgot to re-connect the cooling fan on the CPU. Heat failure. It was quite old and ran faithfully for over 10 years with plenty of abuse (no UPS).
I bring this up because going forward, I will NEVER buy a system with a nVidia Video Chip until nVidia fully opens their drivers.
What follows are notes relating to various Slackware releases.
The Thinkpad W541 comes with these Video chips:
Luckily nouveau has no issues and all works well. As noted above, going forward, I will avoid nVidia because the BSDs have issues with nVidia due to it being fully closed source.
I tested nouveau a bit on my hardware using Slackware 14.2. It seems to be acceptable on 14.2, but these slackbuilds:
work better for me, so I stuck with the nVidia proprietary driver.
Under 14.1 X would crash, so with 14.1 I am using nVidia proprietary driver which works without any issues, plus I get to have full 3d support. I installed version 304.116.
Odd that nouveau seemed to backtrack a bit with this release.
Please note, the Nouveau issue is not a problem with Slackware, Nouveau is a package Slackware supplies, with my hardware I would have the same issue no matter what distro I use. Slackware does not automagically get around the issue, which is why I stay with Slackware.
Nouveau with Version 14.0 seems to work fine.
With 13.37 I can use nouveau driver, but I had to turn of 3d, which was not a big deal. Based upon my hardware, I created file "/etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf" with this one line:
options nouveau noaccel=1
to prevent X from showing a mangled screen. That turns off 3d acceleration, I noticed celestia is much slower, but neverball seems to be fine. I really never use 3d applications and only played with celestia when I had the proprietary nVidia driver to see what '3d' was all about. I hear rumors 3d acceleration on nouveau works fine if you install the testing kernel (2.6.38.4) that comes with 13.37. I stuck with the stock kernel (2.6.37.6) because 3d does not do much for me (yet).
$Id: nvidia.gmi,v 2.3 2023/11/13 16:22:15 jmccue Exp $