Red Hat 9 and nVidia drivers

[Stephen]

I've 'successfully' installed the latest nVidia drivers from nvidia.com (the new binary file) and they seem to work fine - but it takes X about 5 minutes to start for some reason. Whenever I type 'startx' I will get a blank screen (monitor is 'on' but display is not displaying anything at all) for five minutes (no hard drive activity), after which the monitor will suddenly get an image and KDE will start up. Before installing the nVidia drivers, X would appear on screen and launch KDE only seconds after I'd entered 'startx'.

My graphics card is a Creative Labs GeForce 3 Ti200. Whilst I don't 'need' the nVidia drivers to run X they make my GUI experience so much better and they significantly improve performance in games, however, it's very annoying to have to wait five minutes everytime I start X.

I did not have this issue under Mandrake 9.0, which I replaced with Red Hat 9 yesterday.

Does anyone have any idea why it might be taking so long for X to start since I installed the drivers? Could anyone suggest a fix?

Many thanks,
-Stephen.

[Void Main]

I have not had that problem with my GeForce 2. Are there any pointers in your /var/log/XFree86.0.log?

[Stephen]

I've checked through /var/log/XFree86.0.log and I couldn't find any obvious error messages although I wasn't sure exactly what to look for (I didn't find any line beginning (EE)).

The only suspect lines I found were a whole series of lines like:

(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "640x350" (vrefresh out of range)

The same line was printed for a large number of different resolutions.

I also came across these lines:

(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "512x384" (bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "2048x1536" (bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (hsync out of range)
(II) NVIDIA(0): Not using default mode "1152x768" (width too large for virtual size)

and I found the following two warning messages:

(WW) NVIDIA(0): Not using mode "576x384":
(WW) NVIDIA(0): horizontal sync start (589) not a multiple of 8

I don't know a great deal about what these lines indicate is happening and whether or not they are typically found in the log file.

Do these message give any hints about what the problem might be?

Thanks,
-Stephen.

[Void Main]

No I don't believe they have anything to do with your problem. I wish I had an idea of what could be the problem. I do believe that you will have a 98% chance of finding an answer as to why you are having the problem and almost as good of chance of finding a solution to the problem if you post your problem on this forum:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdi ... forumid=14

I would suggest first doing a search and if you come up with nothing post a message with your problem. This is the forum nVidia recommends going to for help.

[Stephen]

Thanks for the link, Void.

I visited the forum and it would seem I am most definately not the only person having this problem, however, no one seems to have found a solution yet so I've posted my details to the forum to add to around 80 other posts containing system specs, X config and log files from users who're suffering similar problems. The extent of problems appears to vary from one system to another (and the problem isn't limited to Red Hat), with some people waiting only a minute for X to start and others waiting, like me, as long as five minutes for X to start.

I hope someone tracks down the cause soon or nVidia are able to release revised drivers which address this issue.

-Stephen.

[Void Main]

Just curious if you have tried installing an older version of the driver and have the same problem?

[Stephen]

I seem to experience the same problem with the latest driver, 1.0-4363, and the previous driver, 1.0-4349. I have not tried any drivers older than this but I may give it a go if I get the chance later.

I didn't have any problems using older drivers under Mandrake 9.0 and Mandrake 8.2 but I don't think I had any problems with previous driver (1.0-4349) under Mandrake 9.0. I don't think I got round to installing the very latest driver under Mandrake.

-Stephen.

[Stephen]

After doing a bit of research I've found a solution and X now starts after only a couple of seconds! :D

All I had to do was add the following line to the device section of /etc/X11/XF86Config:

Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "DFP, TV"

This instructs the nVidia driver to not attempt to initialise a device connected to my TV-out or DVI ports - so the driver will only look at my VGA port, initialise my CRT display and then X starts.

It would seem X was taking five minutes to start because the driver was desperately trying to initialise devices on all my graphics card ports for some reason... and the timeout was obviously fairly long.

-Stephen.

[Void Main]

Very cool. I am curious where you found the answer?

[Stephen]

It came down to reading "APPENDIX D: XF86CONFIG OPTIONS" from the documentation provided on nVidia's site (linked to from the same page as the Linux IA32 driver information) which details the various custom options the driver picks up on. I should have read this lot before I bothered to post - oops.

-Stephen.