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Posts Tagged ‘nvidia’

Fedora 13 and Nvidia

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Now that I got my new system running Fedora 13, I needed to configure my Nvidia card to support my two monitors.

It was pretty straightforward, and I found a post that does an excellent job of summarizing it at http://fedorasolved.org/video-solutions/nvidia-yum-kmod

I will comment on one thing though – when I did the install, I used the basic kernel for my i686 32-bit CPU. I found that my 4 GB of RAM only showed up in the system information page as 2.7 GB! I looked into this a bit, and it turns out that if you want greater than 3GB of memory supported, you need to have a 64-bit machine, OR you can handle this in software with the PAE kernel.

PAE stands for “Physical Address Extension” and all you have to do in install the PAE kernel, and then also the PAE Nvidia modules, and everything will work fine!

I know have my machine up with 8GB of RAM and working perfect! I read that the PAE kernel will cause a performance hit (sort of like doing RAID via software versus hardware I suppose), but I don’t see anything like that on my system.

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Installing Fedora 13

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

I was readying my nice new home Linux server/desktop for Fedora 12 when I realized I only had to wait a few more days for Fedora 13. Sounded good!

My new server has a nice Coolermaster case that can hold 10 drives, and has a 1100 Watt power supply. I really like the case, it makes putting in drives a snap, plus the cable wiring went very well. Plus the thing is made of cool brushed aluminum. Who can argue with that?

I was re-commissioning this server after having used it as a gaming Windows machine for a bit. So it had dual NVidia SLI cards (GeForce 8800 Ultra) in it. When I first booted up the LiveCD, it got kernel errors that didn’t really track down to anything that was helpful. It would boot up but then freeze after a few minutes.

I tried the DVD install, and that got the same results. After much head scratching and googling, I tried removing one of the Nvidia cards. I was planning on only using 2 monitors anyway, and each card had 2 DVI outputs. This did the trick!

Next up, I had to run keyboard/mouse cables to my home office. I like to keep the actual computer down in my server room in the basement, it keeps my office nice and quiet. But I found that my 100 foot run for my PS/2 mouse didn’t work! My mouse is a Logitech MX310 that is really USB but I use a PS/2 converter on it so I can use a long cable run. This had been working fine on my previous Linux installations.

I found that the mouse would work fine if directly attached, so it was a distance issue! Which is odd, since on my old server it worked fine, and the cable was the same. I ended up using an USB extender device that I had bought years ago and never needed. It uses ethernet cable in between two adapters so you can have a long USB run. This did the trick! The brand is “coolgear” and I forget where I got it.

Next up: Getting Nvidia working on Fedora 13

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Installing Fedora 11 with dual Video Cards

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I’m configuring a new desktop setup for myself, using dual Nvidia 9600 GSO cards so I can hook up 3-4 monitors. I’ve been using Fedora more than other distros, so I wanted to stick with it for now (although I was tempted, after running into this issue, to jump to Ubuntu).

I had problems getting the DVD bootup to go into graphical mode, it kept showing an error that it couldn’t start X, and would continue with text mode. Of course, this is less than ideal since the text mode doesn’t have all the nice install options (not sure why) so I needed to figure it out.

The easy solution was to remove one of the cards and try again! This did the trick, and now I have Fed11 nicely running on the one card powering two monitors. Another thing to note is that I had to install Nvidia’s linux drivers. Also note, that if you run “yum update” after installing those drivers, you will need to re-install them one more time since yum will overwrite their functions.

My next step is to plug in the 2nd card and see if it is recognized properly and I can get 3 monitors going in independent configurations…

[Update] I added the second card after the fact, and now have 3 monitors hooked up nicely with no problems!

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