Tag Archives: nvidia

Fixing Blueish in Youtube (Flash) in Pangolin

When I tested Pangolin from Live CD, I didn’t encounter any color problem with Youtube. After I installed Pangolin into my system, and then installed NVidia proprietery driver, then I started encounter this blue color problem when watching Youtube or any other flash-based video streaming website.

I tried to find a solution for this problem in many forums. Most of them pointing the problem to Adobe, and some pointing to NVidia. I didnt care about this pointing problem, because I need those two software, so I needed a solution.

Eventually I found out the source of the problem is flash-based video cannot run using hardware acceleration. There are some solutions that suggested in forums:

  • Remove “libvdpau1” package from Pangolin system. This package is used by flash for hardware acceleration.
  • Disable hardware acceleration option from Youtube. Right-click on the video, select “Settings” and then untick the “Hardware Acceleration”. But alas, I couldn’t untick it, and I couldn’t remove the “Settings” window either. From this thread in this forum I found out that compiz cause this problem. So, I logged out from my system, logged in again using Unity 2D, and now it was possible to disable the hardware acceleration. I logged out and logged in again, and then tried to watch Youtube again. Voila, the blueish color was gone.

Reference:

 

 

Ubuntu Update Breaks NVidia Composite Display

Yesterday evening I’ve encountered an annoying problem. My composite display was broken. My compiz was not working properly. I couldn’t play any games that using 3D texture. I remember that the night before I installed regular updates from Ubuntu. As Homer says, DOUB! That must be the cause. Sometimes I don’t understand why this kind of problem must be happening. When I run “compiz-check”, it returned:

Gathering information about your system…
.
Distribution:          Ubuntu 10.04
Desktop environment:   GNOME
Graphics chip:         nVidia Corporation Device 0a2b (rev a2)
Driver in use:         nvidia
Rendering method:      Nvidia
.
Checking if it’s possible to run Compiz on your system…
.
Checking for texture_from_pixmap…               [ FAIL ]
Checking for non power of two support…          [ FAIL ]
Checking for composite extension…               [ OK ]
Checking for FBConfig…                          [ OK ]
Checking for hardware/setup problems…           [ SKIP ]
.
At least one check had to be skipped:
Error: Unable to detect maximum 3D texture size

I run “nvidia-bug-report.sh” to check what the error is, and then checked the file generated by the script. The file showed that GLX initialization is failed, and recommended me to reinstall the NVidia driver.

(EE) Apr 29 21:46:19 NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the GLX module; please check in your X
(EE) Apr 29 21:46:19 NVIDIA(0):     log file that the GLX module has been loaded in your X
(EE) Apr 29 21:46:19 NVIDIA(0):     server, and that the module is the NVIDIA GLX module.  If
(EE) Apr 29 21:46:19 NVIDIA(0):     you continue to encounter problems, Please try
(EE) Apr 29 21:46:19 NVIDIA(0):     reinstalling the NVIDIA driver.

As recommended, I reinstalled the NVidia driver. When reinstalling the driver, the installer returned an error message:

ERROR: File ‘/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so’ is not a symbolic link.

After the message, the installer was still continuing the installation process until finish. I restarted my system, and found out that the problem had gone. Then I checked the location of the libglx.so, and it is there. So, I guess that’s the root of the problem. I think Ubuntu has to be more careful with its update, because sometimes it breaks a well-running system. Luckily, the problem is not as complicated as I thought.

Thanks to these forums:

And, special thanks to http://forlong.blogage.de/entries/pages/Compiz-Check for the “compiz-check” script. You Rockz!

Ubuntu Kernel Update Breaks NVidia Driver

A day after the successful installation of Ubuntu 10.04, I ran recommended update of the operating system. One of the update was for its kernel. Because of the Nvidia driver was installed into the system’s kernel, so I thought I had to prepare for the worst.

After the update finished and I restarted the system, my worry became reality, the NVidia driver was missing, so even though I still able to go into Gnome, the screen resolution backed to the standard resolution. When I used Linux Mint, this problem was never happened, maybe it was because last time I used NVidia driver that came with the distro through Envy application. But, for current driver I downloaded manually from the NVidia website.

According to a thread in ubuntuforums.org (I forgot the address) I just need to reinstall the NVidia driver. So, I did it, and it works.

Thanks, God. Luckily, it’s easy…

A Lynx Conquered My Notebook

Since the first time I know Linux 10 years ago I have tried several Linux distro. The first Linux distro that I used was Mandrake (the former of Mandriva), and then followed by openSuse, SimplyMepis, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and the last was Linux Mint, up to last week. From those distros only PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint 4, 6, and 8 that I used daily on my notebook. I am happy with the performance of both distros, especially Linux Mint. It’s very user friendly.

But, last week I decided to install a new distro version. I tried the live cd of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu. Live distro that I tried for first time was Ubuntu 10.04, and I already faced have a problem. The live distro could not boot properly, it showed a blank screen. Then, I tried with Kubuntu and Linux Mint, all of them had the same problem. An obvious result because all of the distros are based on Ubuntu. After google-ing for several hours, I found out from a forum that the cause was “nouveau”, an open-source driver for NVidia. According to the website I need to disable the driver by adding an option command into the grub command.

nouveau.modeset=0

So, the grub command became:

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=2b69f855-de8b-461b-8f8b-02e3bf7d1142 ro nouveau.modeset=0  quiet splash

By using this command, I was able to boot into the live distro, not only Ubuntu, but also Kubuntu and Linux Mint.

Linux Mint 9 Isadora looked similar to its previous version, but I was impressed with the Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I read some reviews for Ubuntu and Kubuntu, looked like Ubuntu received a lot of praises, but Kubuntu received some negative critics. So, it was decided to install Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit Lucid Lynx into my Sony Vaio VPCCW26FG.

The Ubuntu installation was very smooth, I didn’t get any trouble when installing it. After installation I rebooted to my new OS by disabling the “nouveau” driver in the grub command. And, then I amended the “/etc/default/grub” to disable “nouveau” driver, so I don’t need to amend the grub command every time I boot. In the file I put:

# Disable Nouveau driver
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”nouveau.modeset=0″

And then I ran the command below from terminal:

sudo update-grub

I restarted the OS and I could access Lucid Lynx successfully without needed to amend the grub command.

Unlike my previous Linux Mint, Lucid Lynx is able to detect my wireless, so I just need to connect to my wireless modem and typed the password. For addition, I needed to change the wireless setting in my Network Manager to connect automatically every time I log in.

Everything works fine in my new OS, except my NVidia GeForce GT 330m. In order to settle this, I followed instruction from the forum. I downloaded NVidia driver from NVidia website, and then I ran the command below to go to command line and disable the Gnome.

sudo service gdm stop

And, then install the downloaded NVidia driver. After the installation I added 2 lines into “Device” section in “/etc/xorg.conf”:

Option         “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP-0”
Option         “CustomEDID” “DFP-0: /proc/acpi/video/NGFX/LCD/EDID”

After this step I rebooted the OS and, foila, my screen resolution became “1600×900”.

Mission completed ! 😀
Now time for restoring my favorite applications.

Special thanks to “TheRawGod” from “ubuntuforum.org”.

Linux Mint 8 on Vaio VPCCW26FG

Once upon a time I got a brand new Sony Vaio VPCCW26FG, due to hardware problem with my previous notebook. It’s quite elegant, maybe because it has a white color. It came with Windows 7. I tried Windows 7 for a few weeks. I can say Windows 7 is far much better than Windows Vista. It’s boot speed is amazing, less than a minute I can start an application already. It’s display also a mouth drooling appearance. It’s task bar only shows the running application’s icon, where we can see the mini application version by hovering the mouse over it. But, there are two things that obviously I don’t like from Windows 7. Firstly, the main menu system (the menu that shown after click the Start Menu) is too pack. When I select to an application folder, it only shows the content of the folder. I still like the Windows XP menu system. Secondly, most of the applications that come with this notebook are trial version only. I can’t complain, actually, it’s just typical Windows environment. Every notebook that bundle with it always come with trial version applications. Just can’t complain…

Anyway, whatever how good a Windows Operating System is, I still wanted to use Linux on my Vaio. I still chose Linux Mint over other Linux distro, because I had faith with this distro. I installed the distro while I kept the Windows 7 on my system, so it was a dual-boot system. The installation went very smoothly and fast. Then, I started encounter problems, when I was configuring the system. There are two major problems that I encountered:

  1. The wireless was not working either.
  2. NVidia driver was not working properly, the screen just shown a blank screen after I installed the NVidia driver and restarted the system.

Fixing Wireless Hardware

Vaio VPCCW26FG is using Intel network device 422c. I found out from Ubuntu forum that this problem could be fix by installing backported kernel. I followed the instruction and it fixed the problem. My Linux Mint was able to detect the wireless hardware. The kernel version that I used is 2.6.31-19-generic. Read this thread to get more information.

I think this problem was rather easy to fix.

Installing NVidia Driver

Fixing this problem was more difficult than the wireless problem. I spent a few days to find the solution in the Internet. Eventually I found the solution in Ubuntu forum as well. In order to fix this problem I needed to extract the display edid from running Windows in the notebook by using special program. But, somehow the programs that mentioned in the forum thread was not working properly with Windows 7. In the end I was using the edid that provided in the forum thread. The edid had to be put in /etc/X11 folder. After that, I installed the NVidia driver, and amended xorg.conf to include the edid.

Below is my xorg.conf file content:

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier     “Layout0”
Screen      0  “Screen0” 0 0
InputDevice    “Keyboard0” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice    “Mouse0” “CorePointer”
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load           “dbe”
Load           “extmod”
Load           “type1”
Load           “freetype”
Load           “glx”
EndSection

Section “ServerFlags”
Option         “Xinerama” “0”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier     “Mouse0”
Driver         “mouse”
Option         “Protocol” “auto”
Option         “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option         “Emulate3Buttons” “no”
Option         “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier     “Keyboard0”
Driver         “kbd”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier     “Monitor0”
VendorName     “Unknown”
ModelName      “Nvidia Default Flat Panel”
HorizSync       29.0 – 47.0
VertRefresh     0.0 – 61.0
Option         “DPMS”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier     “Device0”
Driver         “nvidia”
VendorName     “NVIDIA Corporation”
BoardName      “GeForce GT 330M”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier     “Screen0”
Device         “Device0”
Monitor        “Monitor0”
DefaultDepth    24
Option         “TwinView” “0”
Option         “metamodes” “nvidia-auto-select +0+0”
Option         “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP-0,DFP-1,CRT”
Option         “CustomEDID” “DFP-0:/etc/X11/sony_VAIO_CW_1600_900.bin”
SubSection     “Display”
Depth       24
EndSubSection
EndSection

For more detail information and to get the edid, please read this thread.

For anyone who encounter the same problems with me, you have to fix the wireless problem first before fix the NVidia driver. Because installing NVidia driver will modify your Linux kernel.