Nvidia support

[Bill Fink]

On Fri May 17 2002, brad allison wrote:

> I was talking about my G4 900Mhz Quicksilver which came with a GeForce4 
> card.
> 
> I was able to find a co-worker who has an older G4 with a GeForce2 MX card 
> and we traded.
> 
> So I'm now testing against the GeForce2 MX card which is listed as 
> "supported".
> 
> I was able to X working with it using the "nv" driver however it seems to 
> ignore everything in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and it boots into whatever 
> resolution it wants.  The numbers don't match.
> 
> I figured this would be the fb settings so I checked what fbset says.  
> fbset says I'm at mode "640x480-283" which is what my consoles are running 
> at.
> 
> I selected 1280x1024 in Xconfigurator, when X starts it's coming up in 
> 1280x960.
> 
> Anyone know why?  Or how to fix this?

You might give this a try:

First boot a kernel with the riva kernel driver enabled but don't start X,
i.e. boot into runlevel 3.  Create a new entry in /etc/yaboot.conf with
something like the following line added:

	append="video=riva:1280x1024-24@60 3"

Adjust the screen resolution, color depth, and refresh rate as desired.
Run ybin, reboot, and select the new kernel entry when booting.

If you get usable console video by doing this, login as root and do:

	fbset -x

Cut and paste the output from the "fbset -x" command into the
Section "Modes" portion of your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file, say right
above the corresponding EndSection.  Then go to the Section "Screen",
and for each SubSection "Display", change the "Modes" entry to correspond
with the new Mode you added to the Section "Modes".  Also make sure the
DefaultDepth is set as desired to 8, 16, or 24 (avoid 32 as I think that
may cause trouble based on some other posts I've seen).

Now reboot a kernel with the riva kernel driver disabled, i.e. using just
the OpenFirmware video (need to have the "novideo" option in the yaboot
entry).  I'd suggest still just booting into runlevel 3 (append="3") and
test out X by running /etc/X11/X.  If this works OK, then you can reboot
once more, still using the "novideo" option but booting up into runlevel 5,
and hopefully X would then have the desired screen resolution and color
depth, but I'm not making any promises.

Be sure to have taken the steps previously described in my HOWTO to
prevent the system from cloberring your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file.

Finally, with the OpenFirmware video, you don't have much control over
the video settings, but that's the current tradeoff.  You can either have
great console video with the riva kernel driver or great accelerated X
video with the "nv" X driver, but not both at the same time.  Hopefully
this and the nasty logout problem will be resolved eventually and we'll
be able to have the best of both worlds.  Until then, since I spend much
more time in X than using the console, I'll stick with using the OpenFirmware
console video so I can have the major benefits of the accelerated "nv"
X driver.

						-Bill