From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jun 6 16:41:34 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 51A2C1065676 for ; Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:41:34 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk) Received: from relay.ptn-ipout02.plus.net (relay.ptn-ipout02.plus.net [212.159.7.36]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E00828FC1D for ; Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:41:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: ApoEAL84KkrUnw6S/2dsb2JhbADOGYQKBQ Received: from ptb-relay02.plus.net ([212.159.14.146]) by relay.ptn-ipout02.plus.net with ESMTP; 06 Jun 2009 17:41:33 +0100 Received: from [84.92.153.232] (helo=curlew.milibyte.co.uk) by ptb-relay02.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1MCyxY-0005tc-Qb; Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:41:32 +0100 Received: by curlew.milibyte.co.uk with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1MCyxY-00035l-CY; Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:41:32 +0100 From: Mike Clarke To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Jerry Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 17:41:31 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.10 References: <20090606085158.383a477b@scorpio> <200906061500.49168.jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk> <20090606102317.62ddd4ca@scorpio> In-Reply-To: <20090606102317.62ddd4ca@scorpio> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200906061741.32294.jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk> X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on curlew.milibyte.co.uk); SAEximRunCond expanded to false X-Plusnet-Relay: da2ac6b56803956967b0bb4adf084bab Cc: Subject: Re: Driver for nVidia Geforce 6150LE X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:41:34 -0000 On Saturday 06 June 2009, Jerry wrote: > On Sat, 6 Jun 2009 15:00:48 +0100 > > Mike Clarke wrote: > >No, in the absence of a 64 bit driver from Nvidia you'd need to use > >the nv driver included in the xorg-drivers port. I had quite a > >struggle to get the nv driver to give me a 1280x1024 display. > > OK, exactly how did you get it to work? My initial attempt with "Xorg -configure" and the nv driver resulted in me getting just an 800x600 display. I was able to fix this by adding 'Modes "1280x1024"' to the display subsection of the screen section but this resulted in the entire display being shifted about 50 pixels to the right. I couldn't correct this with the auto-adjust button on the monitor but after fiddling around with xvidtune I was able to get a modeline for something which looked acceptable but I wasn't too happy with it because the monitor was no longer able to show full details about resolution and frequency in it's on screen status display. The nvidia driver wasn't without it's problems either but I got there in the end. Initially I tried the nvidia-driver port but all I got was a black screen with a single row of white pixels across the top of the screen. After a bit of trial and error I found that I could get a working display by using portdowngrade to revert to version 169.12. Unfortunately after the upgrade of xorg in January this old version of nvidia-driver failed to work and gave me the black screen with white dots and I got error messages about being unable to load nvidia_drv.so. No solution to this was forthcoming but I found that the nvidia-driver-96 port would work. Although this is a much older driver the port is still maintained so I should be less likely to hit compatibility problems in the way I did by using a downgraded version of the newer driver. > That port version is several versions old. Perhaps the maintainer > will update to the latest version. According to the change-log, it > corrects quite a few problems. I'm hoping that the problems fixed in the latest version relate to issues with the newer and/or more powerful graphics chips. So far I've not had any problems with this driver. > >The lack of a 64bit Nvidia driver was one of the reasons I installed > >the i386 version of FreeBSD on this 64bit platform. > > Unfortunately, I will probably have to do that also. Since it is not > going to be used for anything critical, it probably does not matter. > It would be nice if FreeBSD gets around to supporting 64 bit drivers > like this so that a user could take advantage of a 64 bit system. Well I certainly don't seem to be missing out on anything by using i386 but I only have 2GB memory anyway, it would be a different matter if I had 4GB or more. -- Mike Clarke