Checking nVIDIA driver blob versions

I'm half thinking about a GPU upgrade for my desktop machine and I'm also thinking that hotswapping an nVIDIA card for my aging GeForce 9500 GT may work.  Doing a bit of homework, I decided to check what the driver version is right now.

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  313.30  Wed Mar 27 16:56:45 PDT 2013

GCC version:  gcc version 4.7.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.3-1ubuntu1) 

From the NV's documentation, it covers GPUs all the way to GTX 770.  That's good to know!

Some thoughts...

Next time you install graphics drivers, check with the manufacturer's website before grabbing the driver directly from nVIDIA or AMD.

Saints Row The Third is insane!

Setting up my new laptop...

I bought the HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and so far, it's been great.  Most of the hardware seem to work out of the box.  The only sticking point thus far has been AMD which continues to be an absolute failure of a company in the Linux world.  I half-expected AMD graphics drivers to suck on Linux, but had hoped that Valve's Linux push would mean decent fglrx releases.  I was wrong.  So wrong.

When I installed my Ubuntu 12.10 on my desktop running nVIDIA hardware, the process was relatively painless.  There's a few hoops for sure, but everything worked fine afterwards.  Well, AMD is a truly a POS when it comes to Linux support.  I've tried to install the kernel headers, and configured their fglrx drivers repeatedly and it only produced issues.  Way to go Ubuntu and AMD.  It's apparently a known issue, and one that hasn't been solved until now.  Seriously.

Ubuntu 12.10: nVIDIA Oops!

I thought installing the nvidia drivers would be very easy.  Turns out, I was wrong.  I ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-current which failed because apparently, it didn't include the kernel headers.  I ended up with vesa and without the taskbar, rendering the desktop useless.

To fix this, I went to the commandline screen (ctrl+alt+f1) and logged in.  Then sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic and then sudo apt-get remove nvidia-* to get rid of the currently installed nvidia drivers.  Lastly, I ran the nvidia driver install again: sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates nvidia-settings to recompile the drivers (and slipped in the config app).  After reboot, all's well!  Special thanks to this forum thread.

Pulse Audio still exhibits the same issues with HDMI where the audio being played misses a few seconds.  Typical of this POS audio layer.

Now it's about trying to get this Logitech Quickcam to work which used to work splendidly on 9.10.  Oh well, time to see what's going on.

Ubuntu 12.10 - Growing Pains

I guess no matter how good things get with Ubuntu, you still get the usual first boot scares.  In my case, it's the video display (surprise! surprise!).  I run a GeForce 9500 GT and it's an old card for sure.  When I got to finally boot, I got a purple screen and then no video signal issue.  Poking around I realized I had to set the kernel options on grub to nomodeset but it's been a while since I last mucked with grub.  So, I wanted to do a post here that summarizes everything I've learned.

If you don't get the grub menu on boot, just before grub loads, press SHIFT.  Since I had the network boot to start, I had to press CTRL+C to stop network boot and then wait for the routine to exit.  Before the text "grub loading" appears, I was jamming the SHIFT key like crazy.  From there, I edit the first option (ubuntu) and then add nomodeset to the linux/boot entry.

Many, many thanks to this Ubuntu forum thread for the info.  It's nice to see that there's so much self-help information available online to fix these things.

Now it's time to get a real nvidia driver up and running!

It's fixed! libGL confusion!

After some searching, I began to understand the nature of the problem more. Basically, the build-dep pulled in a truck load of libraries for me to build Wine and one of them slipped this in:

/usr/lib/mesa/libGL.so.1.2

nvidia has their own libGL.so.1 that sits in /usr/lib but no matter what I did, ldconfig insists on using the latest version (and gets it wrong) by asserting the use of the mesa one. So, even though nvidia starts up just fine, the library it's using is wrong. That means that I don't get the hardware acceleration at all. Lesson learned.

For now, I created a .usr_lib_mesa folder and dumped libGL.so.1.2 in it so that if I ever need it, I can put it back. But immediately after removing it and having ldconfig rebuild, everything has been fine. The games run and glxinfo is now reporting what it needs to.

Goodness!

Credit to this post.