I have been successfully using smxi/sgfxi for at least two years but this is the first time that I am hitting the wall. Various attempt of installing the current driver and the debian driver are no go for me. Running sgfxi again give a no driver installed message even when the previous attempt ended with driver successfully installed. I keep getting the black screen with a blinking little line like a cursor for typing.
I have a GeForce GTX660 card.

Please let me know if I need to provide additional information.

Thank you.
Back to top

there was a change in nvidia, untypically lame of them, where they stopped supporting the xorg.conf syntax for card id they have supported for at least 10 years, for no reason, and with no warning.

The issue, or one of them, that happened is that the old Card0 now must be Device0 etc for all cards. Why a company can't be bothered to test for DeviceX OR CardX when they have supported the latter for 10 years is absolutely beyond me, unless this was an Xorg change, and the same goes then, why xorg would do such a stupid thing is totally beyond me. The only thing I know is that when I reported this to damentz who had had a failure, and he did that small edit/update, his nvidia worked right away, but for others, it didn't, so I don't know.

These kind of utterly pointless changes are what has always kept free desktops from reaching their true potential, a fact that has always made me sad because the difference between treating end users well and being lazy is really often just a few minutes of thought and a few lines of code.

sgfxi now has that fix/update in it, so the first thing you want to check is that you've run sgfxi since I added the fix, the second is to confirm that your xorg.conf has been corrected.

Also use: sgfxi -f
to force the reinstall, that will update xorg.conf as well.

If it works, that's the only issue, if it doens't, there is another one.
Back to top

Thanks for your pointers I will get to it when I get home this afternoon.
Back to top

So far I am not successfull. I will hang out with nouveau until my heart goes sour again.
Back to top

if you ran sgfxi -f and it still didn't work, and if xorg.conf has Device0 now instead of Card0 then there is a new issue.

There's a new driver, I forgot to add it, I'll update it now.

There was a bug in the sgfxi fix, damentz, I will blame him openly, failed to test his suggestion, which doesn't work with sed in bash, though it looks like it would.

So give it another try.

sgfxi -f
Back to top

Thanks for your help. The current driver did not work for me for some reason but the beta version one worked.
Back to top

OH! ok, that's more information. So there may be some issue with the previous series, that's interesting.

Now I had repeated issues and bugs with the sgfxi fix for this issue, those were caused by my being braindead, too much programming at work, but I believe sgfxi itself is now correctly updating xorg.conf.

You can check this for yourself:

grep Card0 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

grep Device0 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

the first should return nothing, the second 2 at least items.. AFTER you run sgfxi again if it still shows Card0, that is. If it shows Device0 only, then sgfxi worked.

So it sounds like my guess was right, some users are having two issues, one the xorg Card0 thing, the other unknown driver issue, but other users had only the Card0 thing. For them, the simple edit/fix should have resolved the issue.
Back to top

Like you said:


Back to top

gaasfet on IRC pointed this one out.





Note that some of these can be removed with sgfxi command line args, but you can just comment those out of xorg.conf then restart x to see.

Note he didn't test each line, so not all 3 may need to be commented out, maybe just one.
Back to top

OT: h2, I finally got rid of my AMD card.

I got the same result as job. sgfxi - f still didn't get it done, but installing the beta driver worked like a charm.
Back to top