[KLUG Members] re: ugrade problems

[greenproc]

fireball9207 at charter.net wrote:
> ---- Andrew Thompson <tempes at ameritech.net> wrote: 
>   
>> On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 18:20 -0700, fireball9207 at charter.net wrote:
>>     
>
>   
>> When you say it won't come on, do you mean it just won't display
>> graphics, or it won't display anything at all? 
>>     
>
> Nothing at all.
>
> If you can still see text
>   
>> scrolling up the screen on bootup,
>>     
>
> No text when booting up. Just the yellow light like when it's asleep. It's very frustrating, as I don't have the $$ to get a new video card, and the download came from a Yast pugrade site. I'd seen it for a while and thought, well, I might as well just do it, as the video card says nvidia when it comes up. Man, was I ever Wrong on that!! That'll be the last time that I do that kind of upgrade for the video card. Especially when I made sure that every thing that I bought for this box was specifically just for linux. 
>
> thanks Andrew
>   
When a kernel update is done, the video drivers also have to be updated,
because the video drivers include an interface to the kernel which needs
to match the kernel version.  This happens to me ( and countless
thousands of others) all the time too, and it will happen  regardless if
you have an nvidia card or an ati card.  You were wise to make sure that
there was a linux driver for the hardware you purchased, but
unfortunately that is not enough. 

Without going into boring details about how video drivers released from
the video card vendor have to be subsequently customized for your
particular linux distribution, it should suffice to say that some
distributions are better than others at keeping video driver updates in
sync with the kernel updates, and other graphics system files.  To
complicate the issue further, if you mix video drivers from your linux
vendor, with video drivers from the video card manufacturer (that is,
you have installed your video driver from Yast, and also have used the
driver installer from nvidia), there is the possibility that your
graphics can be broken altogether -- often the graphics card vendor's
driver installer doesn't play nice with your linux distributions
graphics files and will arrogantly overwrite your system's graphics
files with it's own.

This problem could be solved if video card vendors would release the
full source to their drivers, but that's another topic.  Enough about
why/how the problem you have is occurring, and on to a solution ...

You say that the update came from Yast -- but where is Yast pulling the
update from?  Is it ONLY the official OpenSuse repository from Novell,
or have you added some custom install sources for Yast?  Have you at any
point tried using the linux driver installer from nvidia's website?  I
have some suggestions based on how you answer those questions, but based
on your description of the "yellow" monitor light I think your first
problem to solve is not driver related.  Is the light ever green for any
period of time, before it turns yellow?

Even if your graphics drivers are broken on your system, you should
still be seeing something on your computers screen when you turn it on
-- if you don't see anything at all when you turn your computer on, then
you have a much more serious problem than graphics drivers, let me tell
you!  When the computer first starts it goes through a self-check
procedure and information is displayed on the screen directly from the
computer's video BIOS.  Some systems hide this information, or finish
the self-check procedure before your monitor warms up, so you might not
see any of the self-check information.  Try hitting <Del>, <F10>, <F1>,
<F2>, or whatever it is for your system to enter the BIOS setup.  If you
cannot enter your computer's BIOS setup program then you have a problem
with your computer hardware -- make sure that you are using a known good
working monitor before drawing conclusions about other things.

If your computer is booting, but you have no display, you might be able
to get into text mode by pressing <CTRL-ALT-F1> to get a text console. 
If you get a text console, your monitor and graphics card is working,
and your system managed to boot, and the graphics drivers need to be fixed.

Good luck, and tell is if you can get at least the basic BIOS display to
work, and if the system is actually booting; only after that is it
possible for us to help you.

















>
>  then you probably just need to
>   
>> rebuild and reinstall. nVidia's native drivers. I've had to do that
>> several times myself; basically, whenever I updated the kernel, or put
>> in a new distro entirely.
>>
>> SuSE 9.2, has a package to do it, called "nvidia-installer." I think you
>> have to download it separately from the main distro because of patent or
>> copyright issues, but you should be able to find it online. If you can't
>> find it for SuSE, nVidia itself offers Linux drivers that you should be
>> able to build on just about any distro. Check their site, and go from
>> there.
>>
>> Good luck!
>>
>> -- 
>> Andrew Thompson <tempes at ameritech.net>
>> The Imagerie
>>
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