PCLos 2011.09 Full and Mini display issues when using old NVidia cards w/Nouveau

[oldschool]

To all us temporarily poor folk using ancient hardware,

Independently wealthy and/or advanced "world beater" level probem solvers ...

Please don't snicker!

After a great deal of time, testing and effort, I found the solution for getting the old NVidea cards to not break the display when using the Nouveau driver.  There are (to me) a great number of overly complicated and unreliable "solutions" in various places (the often helpful another distro forums, Wiki and such come to mind).  I had all but given up hope of trying to get my GeForce4 series card to work acceptably well (of course, forget 3D acceleration -- just working tolerably well, otherwise) under ANY driver -- Nouveau giving the best performance IF you can get it to work at all. The answer is:

Add nodkmsboot to kernel boot options line!

Problem solved.


oldschool

[rubentje1991]

I think that option was provided as default in the boot lines of PCLinuxOS for some time (however, don't now the current status  )

[oldschool]

rubentje1991,

I think it probably was the default in earilier versions. All I know is that the current ISOs for KDE (both Full and Mini) don't act like they have that by default -- unlike 2011.06 and earlier. The current ISOs definitely don't play nice out of the box with old Nvidia cards. I spent a ton of time searching the PCLos forums, trying to find out what had happened to so drastically impact Nouveau on PCs with old Nvidia cards since 2011.06 (which did not exhibit such atrocious behavior).  It seemed that no one else had the problem, but surely, I'm not the only one with the such antique hardware.  The problem started with a FRESH install of the 2011.09 KDE ISO (I tried KDE Full and KDE Mini -- no joy. The non KDE editions didn't show such issues, however.). Anyway, I got the problem figured out on my own and posted the tip for the sake of others that may have found themselves in a similar situation.


oldschool

[hoos]

Oldschool,

thanks very much!
I run a fully updated Pclos version on my other elderly computer
and added the nodkmsboot option just for the sake of it.
Guess what, even Googleearth runs pretty well now.
Mind you, you must have libdri-drivers-experimental (3D Mesa drivers) installed for it to run
in the first place, but then one gets rewarded.

 Cheers, Hoos.

[oldschool]

hoos,

You're welcome! By the way, good catch concerning the experimental drivers.  I forgot to include them as part of the post.

oldschool

[hoos]

My pleasure