Nouveau driver reset to installation defaults

[mot22]

Hi fedora forum community. I made a mistake with my brand new laptop computer running Fedora 14 64bit.

I installed the nvidia driver from the vendors homepage. But since it does not support regulation of brightness (and the display is that bright that I want to downlevel it), I wanted to go back to the default display driver which is the nouveau driver.

So I uninstalled the nvidia driver and then I realized that I didn't make any backup of the xorg.conf file prior installing the nvidia driver. Shame on me, yeah.

Now when the x-server started, it couldn't find the nvidia driver. Okay, fair as it was removed.

Next to that my keyboard becomes unresponsive. That's really aching as I can not switch to a text-based console any longer.

I'm able to boot into initmode 3 by editing the kernel parameters in the boatloader. I'm also able to edit the xorg.conf with vi in the shell then and start the xserver to test things by calling xinit.

I already tried to recover a bit from this situation by removing the references to the nvidia driver and replaced it with some information I could find on the nouveau homepage - but no luck so far, keyboard still freezes and login window does not appear.

I could take a look into the xorg.0.log which warns me about the keyboard getting disabled but I do not really understand why. Next to that I find some other additional information. My computer experience is quite okay, but I'm somehow new to Fedora, I started half a year ago with Fedora 13 on my other laptop which worked like a breeze.

I wondered where I can find information about how to configure the xserver in the default configuration, if there is some reset functionality or so, that brings me back to installation defaults. Those worked ok for the nouveau driver. Unfourtionatly I was not able to gather the correct package name that would probably had helpded me by removing and installing it again.

Next to fixing my setup, I had another idea as this is a quite new install to just re-run the install again on to that machine. Is this possible with keeping the files in my homedir?

Any kind of help is really appreaceated. The graphics card is NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M and the computer is Lenovo Thinkpad W510.

[JEO]

I think that the nvidia proprietary driver from their website overwrites libGL so you should download the proper rpm for F14 64bit from Fedora Koji it is called mesa-libGL and also you might need mesa-libGLU and then reinstall them with.

su -
cd <directory you downloaded it to>
rpm -Uvh --replacefiles --replacepkgs mesa-libGL*

[mot22]

Hi JEO, thanks for the hint I will try that I think I have read that somewhere else as well but was not so sure about it.

Can't I do this with a yum command? Yum normally takes care about the download as well and I think I've seen that mesa-libGL package in the yum listing or yum search.

I'll give it a try and will start with your suggestion and take a peek for yum.

---------- Post added 19th January 2011 at 02:01 AM ---------- Previous post was 18th January 2011 at 11:08 PM ----------

Okay, well, I have to admit that I have no clue, but after booting into Fedora 14 again, it already was fixed. Looks like that I didn't need to refresh the mesa-libGL* rpms so far to get it running again. So thanks for the help.

I did run a yum check but it's reporting some errors:

# yum check
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
mesa-libGLU-7.9-5.fc14.i686 has missing requires of libGL.so.1
wine-core-1.3.10-1.fc14.i686 has missing requires of libGL.so.1
Error: check all

I know that .so are shared objects, libraries of binary machine code. 7.9-5.fc14 is the latest, but I think something went wrong because this is a 64bit system and those entries are i686 ones. Everything else looks pretty much as it was before.

Update:

# yum reinstall mesa-libGLU

did the trick to fix the error reported by yum check or yum check all.

[ozjd]

As many apps are i686 you need the i686 versions of libs as well as the 64 bit versions.

There is a nvidia driver for Fedora. Look at the link to the thread in my signature.

[mot22]

Hi ozjd, thanks for the additional infos:

Originally Posted by ozjd

As many apps are i686 you need the i686 versions of libs as well as the 64 bit versions.

Thanks for letting me know. I already thought so but I was not entirely sure.

Originally Posted by ozjd

There is a nvidia driver for Fedora. Look at the link to the thread in my signature.

I've seen that How-To you refer to yesterday. Unfortunately my card Quadro FX 880M / 0x0A3C is not part of it, it only has GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 & 500 series -or- GeForce FX -or- GeForce 4 and below. So that's all GeForce but no Quadro FX.

I did run the vendor installer three days ago and it worked in the end. The installer was giving notices what it expects (kernel header files, non-running x-server etc.), so this was no problem.

But for the description given in the link you posted I'm unsure because my card is not in that list (it _is_ supported by the nvidia 64bit driver). I probably give it a try again, this time with a backup of my xorg.conf.

It's a bit a choice between the two:

1.) The nouveau driver has problems with bit-blitting or something similar: shaking a window fast left-right repeatedly will mess up it's display until it repaints fully again (e.g. by resizing it). Using gnome desktop if that makes a difference. I can live with that, I like this additional security feature to hide a windows content my shaking it.

2.) For the nvidia driver I'm not able to control the brightness.

for 1.) I think this can be reported and fixed. For 2.) I have no clue at all how responsive the vendor is to reports.

[mot22]

Hi ozjd, thanks for the additional infos:

Originally Posted by ozjd

As many apps are i686 you need the i686 versions of libs as well as the 64 bit versions.

Thanks for letting me know. I already thought so but I was not entirely sure.

Originally Posted by ozjd

There is a nvidia driver for Fedora. Look at the link to the thread in my signature.

I've seen that How-To you refer to[1] yesterday. Unfortunately my card Quadro FX 880M / 0x0A3C is not part of it, it only has GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 & 500 series -or- GeForce FX -or- GeForce 4 and below. So that's all GeForce but no Quadro FX.

[1] hxxp://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752

I did run the vendor installer three days ago and it worked in the end. The installer was giving notices what it expects (kernel header files, non-running x-server etc.), so this was no problem.

But for the description given in the link you posted I'm unsure because my card is not in that list (it _is_ supported by the nvidia 64bit driver[1]). I probably give it a try again, this time with a backup of my xorg.conf.

[1] hxxp://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/260.19.29/README/supportedchips.html

It's a bit a choice between the two:

1.) The nouveau driver has problems with bit-blitting or something similar: shaking a window fast left-right repeatedly will mess up it's display until it repaints fully again (e.g. by resizing it). Using gnome desktop if that makes a difference. I can live with that, I like this additional security feature to hide a windows content by shaking it.

2.) For the nvidia driver I'm not able to control the brightness.

for 1.) I think this can be reported and fixed. For 2.) I have no clue at all how responsive the vendor is to reports.

[ozjd]

Actually your card is on the list under the Quadro heading. The driver is the same, the one from RPMFusion packaged for Fedora and so doesn't overwrite those files.

The brightness issue is strange. Did you search for your card / machine? Some Lenovo need some specific configuration to work from what I have seen in other threads. Have you updated your system?

[mot22]

I'll do the how-to later today. I have some beginner questions: How do I find out if I have a PAE Kernel or that akmod thingy?

I'm using 64bit. I guess but do not really know that I don't need to have PAE on 64bit to address my 8 GB of RAM, or to say the other way round: PAE is only for 32 bit systems, right? Or is it as well to offer 32 bit applications running on my 64bit system to address more space?

I'm asking this because the how-to differs based on the kernel.

For the other specific problems like brightness I might take a look after I got the nvidia driver running again. Thanks for your help so far, it really helps me progressing.

[ozjd]

There is no 64 bit pae kernel.

The akmod is an option which I would recommend. It overcomes the issue of a kernel update where RPMFusion doesn't have a matching kmod available at the same time. The akmod will create the kmod if it doesn't exist for the kernel you are booting.

[mot22]

I now did the akmod + nvidia via the suggested repository. This did work! I now have 3d-graphics support.

Basically, the Nvidia driver looks to be the same as with manual install and has the same shortcomings in use and integration.

I try to learn now more about controlling brightness of my screen. Thanks for the help so far.

Next to that I think to quit using the nvidia driver and will instead use the nouveau one again as it already support brightness control of the display.

Update:

Following a Quadro FX 880 M thread in the nV News forums, adding the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the "Device" section for the GPU:

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

and restarting the x-server helped me getting brightness control to run. So that's good news for me so far. I'm still trying to learn how I can get booting in a higher resolution then.