blog.johanv.org (Berichten over nvidia)

Dell Precision M4500, Debian Wheezy en nVidia drivers

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:24:11 GMT

Dit weekend installeerde ik Debian Wheezy op mijn Dell Precision M4500 laptop. Deze laptop heeft een nVidia Corporation GT215 [Quadro FX 1800M] grafische kaart, en net zoals bij ongeveer elke mogelijke Linuxdistributie, blijft de nouveau-schermdriver iedere X tijd hangen, waardoor het systeem niet meer reageert. (Zie deze bug in Fedora, maar ik vermoed dat elke distributie een analoge bug zal hebben.)

Dus ben ik wel verplicht om de freedom hating proprietary driver te installeren. Ik haalde de inspiratie op de Debian Wiki; op deze manier werkt het:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` #dit is misschien niet nodig
apt-get install nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-settings

en zet het volgende in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Module"
    Load        "glx"
EndSection
Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Video Card"
    Driver              "nvidia"
EndSection

Rebooten, en dat is dat.

Dell Precision M4500, fedora, nvidia and dual screen

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:06:18 GMT

I was experiencing some problems with my dual screen setup on my Dell Precision M4500 notebook with Fedora 15. Now that I finally have it up and running, I thought I might share my configuration as well.

Update: You have to enable the rpmfusion repositories.

When using the 'free as in freedom' nouveau driver, I experienced a lot of system hangs. I guess this is due to Fedora bug 618143. So I installed the freedom hating NVidia driver as follows:

su -c "yum install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia"

I think I have to install akmod-nvidia instead of kmod-nvidia because F15 is still in beta, but I am not sure about that.

Update: The following doesn't apply anymore for recent versions of Fedora. If you have troubles with your display configuration, I recommend trying arandr. It allows saving your configuration as a shell script, which is cool.

The nvidia-settings tool seems very buggy, and I didn't manage to generate a xorg.conf file. Luckily I had an old file, which worked fine. I put the following in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from data in "/etc/sysconfig/keyboard"
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us_intl"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "DELL 2009W"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 83.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro FX 1800M"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Default Screen"
    Device         "Videocard0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "1"
    Option         "metamodes" "CRT: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP: nvidia-auto-select +1680+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

(My external screen is placed at the left of my laptop. If your configuration is different, I guess you'l have to do some tweaking.)

Fedora/NVidia font problem

Johan Vervloet — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:14:17 GMT

A quick fedora/nvidia tip:

After installing the evil and freedom hating nvidia-drivers on my Fedora system, a lot of font sizes magically increased. It seems you can fix this (per user) by clicking ‘System’, ‘Preferences’, ‘Appearance’. Click the ‘fonts’ tab, then the ‘details’ button, and change the resolution back to 96 dpi.

You can probably change this in some configuration file as well. If you know how, please let me know.