KDE, Wheezy, nVidia...

[Sephiroth]

I have a fairly large problem with one of my desktops at the office. It has an AGP nVidia 7600GS 512MB video card in it. We just wiped it out and put on Wheezy with KDE. I built the "nvidia-kernel-source" package and installed it along with "nvidia-glx" and "nvidia-xconfig". Currently the xorg.conf file contains only the section to load the nvidia driver.

Upon a fresh reboot, one user can login and get full hardware acceleration/compositing. If this user logs out and the same user or any user logs back in, KDE hangs at the login screen with the fourth icon fading in. I have to use pkill to kill the user, restart kdm, and then somebody can login again. I did not have this issue on Squeeze.

Now, I am debating using the official driver, but would prefer not to. What should I do at this point?

[Sephiroth]

Alright, I tried the official driver. Same problem. Log into the system after booting, no problem. Logout and then back in and it freezes on the fourth icon for eternity. What in the heck is causing this? This does not happen on my Intel chipset, low-end card.

[cynwulf]

This used to be an issue with the nvidia proprietary driver (and possibly some other drivers) with certain display managers (startx usually works ok). I use the nvidia driver in slackware (14) and don't see it but I'm sure I used to get this randomly in the past (I have a 7300GT by the way). What version of KDE and KDM and the nvidia blob are you using?

You might want to try editing /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc

And setting:

Code: Select all

TerminateServer=true

[Sephiroth]

That is the value that I was looking for! TerminateServer makes kdm restart each time a user logs out. This should fix my issue. I did try this with both the proprietary driver from nVidia and the one in the non-free repo. Both work, but both do the exact same thing. I will post the results tomorrow if I have time. Thanks!

[Sephiroth]

This appears to have fixed the issue. This appears to fix the issue with both the official drivers and the ones we build from sources in the repository. It is a shame that we have to do this to make a driver work. I feel like nVidia let me down for the first time in all of my years in the PC world. Does anybody else miss 3dfx?

[cynwulf]

Does anybody else miss 3dfx?

They were my 3D accelerator of choice and I owned every single type of VPU they ever produced. Unfortunately they're gone and though a few die hards hung on for a few years hacking drivers, they're pretty much dead and buried. Nvidia had nothing on 3dfx until the original Geforce. It was the Geforce and then ATI's first Radeons which sounded the death knell. 3dfx refused to move with the times and come up with a true GPU with an integrated hardware transformation and lighting engine - instead they continued recycling old tech.

[Sephiroth]

I still have my 3dfx Voodoo 3000 PCI card in my old Gateway G6-233 (P2/233Mhz) system. Still works. It was my first true hardware 3D card that I bought from a friend to play the original Half-Life and TFC.

[cynwulf]

I still have my 3dfx Voodoo 3000 PCI card in my old Gateway G6-233 (P2/233Mhz) system. Still works. It was my first true hardware 3D card that I bought from a friend to play the original Half-Life and TFC.

They were great for their time. The V3 was just a V2-SLI as a single die with a video BIOS and a bit more VRAM...

16 bpp only and not true AGP - "PCI66"... 3dfx never did true AGP... so the difference between the PCI and AGP boards was negligible.

Superb though, I liked the elegant simplicity and flexibility of the glide API...

[Sephiroth]

Hey there is a nice wrapper for Glide out there now that works with Glide versions 1 through 3 and works on both ATI and nVidia cards. Works well for old games on modern systems, assuming the OS allows the game to run.

[Sephiroth]

Just an update to the original issue discussed in this thread. I just installed Wheezy on a Compaq 515 which has an ATI card in it. The system would go to a blank screen with the mouse cursor if you attempted to logout, shutdown, or reboot. The only cure was CTRL+ALT+F1, logging in as root, and killing KDM.

This solution (TerminateServer=true) fixed the problem there also. So tell me again why saving a few hundred micro-seconds is worth the headache that this new default is becoming on both nVidia and ATI cards?