SEO

Hallo daar,

After postponing updates for a few months I finally decided that it was
time for another upgrade of a Gentoo machine but there were (as expected
;-) some problems.

The first big problem was that the (stable) nVidia drivers refused to
work at first, but I tackeled this problem somehow (it involved a whole
bunch of tries, and I finally got it working by rebooting with a
recompiled kernel).

Now they work, but there are some things that don't make me too happy.

A minor problem is that the KDM has been replaced by the plain old XDM,
but the main problem is that if I run /etc/init.d/xdm restart the
machine comletely hangs.

I get a black screen, not even the virtual consoles are woking anymore
and neither is SSH or any of the other network services, so I suspect a
totally hung system.
The only thing I can do is turn it of and trun it back on (cursed are
those workstations without a reset button!)

This is the only thing that I can find in Xorg.0.log, but it's only a
warning:

(WW) xf86OpenConsole: setpgid failed: Operation not permitted
(WW) xf86OpenConsole: setsid failed: Operation not permitted

Anything I can do or try (except completely removing all X stuff and
retrying?)

Wimmy
--
Being owned by someone used to be called slavery.
Now it's called commitment.

Wim Cossement wrote:

> The first big problem was that the (stable) nVidia drivers refused to
> work at first, but I tackeled this problem somehow (it involved a whole
> bunch of tries, and I finally got it working by rebooting with a
> recompiled kernel).

The stable nvidia driver isn't stable on all cards and do not work well with
nv2x chips (like GeForce 4), so emerge 1.0.8776

echo "=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9629" >> /etc/portage//package.mask
emerge x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers


> A minor problem is that the KDM has been replaced by the plain old XDM,
> but the main problem is that if I run /etc/init.d/xdm restart the
> machine comletely hangs.

The choice of "login manager" has switched from /etc/rc.conf to /etc/conf.d/xdm


> I get a black screen, not even the virtual consoles are woking anymore
> and neither is SSH or any of the other network services, so I suspect a
> totally hung system.

Yeah, thats happen before with the nVidia drivers.


> This is the only thing that I can find in Xorg.0.log, but it's only a
> warning:
>
> (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setpgid failed: Operation not permitted
> (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setsid failed: Operation not permitted
>
> Anything I can do or try (except completely removing all X stuff and
> retrying?)

Not sure about this, but seems to haven at usages of other graphics drivers
too, where recommendations seems to have been to upgrade to a newer or even
cvs version when new cards had had this problem, but in your case it may be
gone if you downgrade to the previous stable.


//Aho

J.O. Aho wrote:
> Wim Cossement wrote:
>
>> The first big problem was that the (stable) nVidia drivers refused to
>> work at first, but I tackeled this problem somehow (it involved a
>> whole bunch of tries, and I finally got it working by rebooting with a
>> recompiled kernel).
>
> The stable nvidia driver isn't stable on all cards and do not work well
> with nv2x chips (like GeForce 4), so emerge 1.0.8776
>
> echo "=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9629" >> /etc/portage//package.mask
> emerge x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers

I am using version 1.0.8776... :-(


>> A minor problem is that the KDM has been replaced by the plain old
>> XDM, but the main problem is that if I run /etc/init.d/xdm restart the
>> machine comletely hangs.
>
> The choice of "login manager" has switched from /etc/rc.conf to
> /etc/conf.d/xdm
>
>
>> I get a black screen, not even the virtual consoles are woking anymore
>> and neither is SSH or any of the other network services, so I suspect
>> a totally hung system.
>
> Yeah, thats happen before with the nVidia drivers.

It's quite sucky, but at least it's a free world :-)

>> This is the only thing that I can find in Xorg.0.log, but it's only a
>> warning:
>>
>> (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setpgid failed: Operation not permitted
>> (WW) xf86OpenConsole: setsid failed: Operation not permitted
>>
>> Anything I can do or try (except completely removing all X stuff and
>> retrying?)
>
> Not sure about this, but seems to haven at usages of other graphics
> drivers too, where recommendations seems to have been to upgrade to a
> newer or even cvs version when new cards had had this problem, but in
> your case it may be gone if you downgrade to the previous stable.

This card has been in the system for almost a year, so physically
nothing changed.
And identical machine is working well with slightly older drivers
(,1.0.8762-r1) but is using an older X version (1.0.2-r7 against 1.1.1-r1).

I'll try downlgrading to those if they are still in portage (or take a
binary package from the one to the other)

Wimmy

Wim Cossement wrote:

> This card has been in the system for almost a year, so physically
> nothing changed.
> And identical machine is working well with slightly older drivers
> (,1.0.8762-r1) but is using an older X version (1.0.2-r7 against 1.1.1-r1).

The version of xorg shouldn't matter, test the older driver, it can even be so
that you should use the legacy driver instead (not sure what card you have).


> I'll try downlgrading to those if they are still in portage (or take a
> binary package from the one to the other)

Use quickpkg to make a package for Gentoo (on the machine with the older
driver), don't copy manually or use those packages provided by nVidia, as
Gentoo don't have the files in the same place and uses symlinks to allow easy
switch between opengl's.



//Aho

J.O. Aho wrote:
> Wim Cossement wrote:
>
>> This card has been in the system for almost a year, so physically
>> nothing changed.
>> And identical machine is working well with slightly older drivers
>> (,1.0.8762-r1) but is using an older X version (1.0.2-r7 against
>> 1.1.1-r1).
>
> The version of xorg shouldn't matter, test the older driver, it can even
> be so that you should use the legacy driver instead (not sure what card
> you have).

Well, I got it working again, but I have not tried shutting X down again
since that caused the lockup.
I've got an nVidia Quadro4 980 XGL, I need it for 3D apps (PyMol and
Coot mainly).

>> I'll try downlgrading to those if they are still in portage (or take a
>> binary package from the one to the other)
>
> Use quickpkg to make a package for Gentoo (on the machine with the older
> driver), don't copy manually or use those packages provided by nVidia,
> as Gentoo don't have the files in the same place and uses symlinks to
> allow easy switch between opengl's.

That was the plan, but that still did not work, then xdm.log was
complaining about different versions of the X nvidia module and the
driver. I just cheked what version it wanted and installed that (was
1.0.8776 btw)

Thanks for the help!

Wimmy