[NBLUG/talk] I can't get 3D acceleration to work

Troy Arnold fryman at sonic.net
Sat May 22 22:38:54 PDT 2004


On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 08:13:34PM -0700, William Tracy wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have an nVidia GeForce 4 that's working well under
> SuSE except that I have absolutely  no hardware
> accelerated 3D support.

You're in luck.  That's probably one of the easiest cards to get nice, fast and
stable 3d accelerated X going on.  What you need to do is grab the driver file
from this page: <http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html>

You'll end up with a file called something like:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run

As root, change into the directory where you saved it and make sure that
is is executable:
# chmod 700 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run
then run it:
# ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run

Read carefully and follow the instructions, and you should be nearly
there.

o.k, there is one more step.  All of this is covered in the README that ships
with the driver file, and is also listed on the driver download page.  The
README is long, but has lots of good stuff.  But here's the
quick-n-not-too-dirty:

You'll need to edit your X config file (probably /etc/X11/XF86Config-4)
and do the following: (It doesn't hurt to make a backup before editing
this file...)

Find the section labeled: Section "Device"
There should be a line like so:
	Driver	"nv" (or perhaps, Driver "vesa")
change that to:
	Driver "nvidia"

Find the section labeled: Section "Module"
make sure you have:
	Load   "glx"
and these two lines should be removed or commented out:
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "GLcore"

You may also need: (can't remember for sure, sorry)
	Option      "RenderAccel" "on"
in the driver section.

A good way to test your performance is to run a program called 'glxgears' which
is usually available.  Run it before you install the nvidia drivers also so
that you'll have something to compare it to.

> While trying to solve the problem, I dug around in
> /var/log for the XFree86 log file. Low and behold, I
> found:
> 
> XFree86.0.0.log
> XFree86.0.0.log.old
> XFree86.0.log
> XFree86.0.log.old
> XFree86.1.log
> XFree86.99.0.log
> XFree86.99.0.log.old
> 
> As far as I knew, I only had one version of XFree86
> installed and in use. Now the question is, which one?
> Is there some command to find what version of X is
> running?

Your log is probably the one with the most recent date.  A failsafe way to get
a proper X log is to exit out of X completely, back to a plain console prompt.
>From the prompt, type:
startx > xlog 2>&1

That command runs 'startx' which will usually try and fire up X for you.  the
'>' redirects any text output to the file called 'xlog' in the current
directory. '2>&1' basically says send any error messages to the same place as
the text messages.  You can then look at 'xlog' at your convenience.

-troy





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