[conspire] new laptop Fedora 13 with NVIDIA graphics card, - yum update - now only blank screen

[Ed Biow]

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> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:55:37 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Since you say it's some Nvidia thing, you could specifically do this:
>
>   lspci | grep -i nvidia
>
> That will tell you what specific model of Nvidia video chipset is
> mounted on your motherboard.  Armed with _that_ knowledge, you can then
> look up what support the X.org open-source 'nv' driver
> (http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/nv) has for that specific Nvidia video
> chipset.  However, I'd be really surprised if 'nv' doesn't do regular,
> non-3D video perfectly.
>
> More at:
> http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/NVIDIAProprietaryDriver
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#NVIDIA
>
>

Actually, Fedora now defaults to the open source nouveau driver
instead of nv these days. Nouveau is apparently a reverse engineered
version of the proprietary driver.  Nouveau is also the default Nvidia
hardware driver for Lucid Ubuntu 10.04 and openSUSE 11.3 and is in the
Debian experimental repository.   Although nouveau aims to implement
3D functionality, by default it doesn't do so at the moment, though it
is possible to enable experimental 3D in Fedora with the
mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

I installed Fedora 11 on a newish Nvidia based laptop last year. It
worked very nicely at first, but subsequent upgrades kept breaking the
proprietary Nvidia driver and I eventually gave up and put Ubuntu on
it.  Fedora is just a little too cutting edge for me.

As an aside, I recently installed Debian Testing on a friends PPC
Macbook.  He is does video production and animation using a Mac with
programs like Final Cut Pro, Maya, After Effects, a bit of Avid, and
he wants to learn Blender and thought it would run better in Linux
than in the laptop's native OSX.  I found that the Debian repository
for PowerPC includes most open source programs, but there is very
limited support available "out there" for proprietary stuff, so I
can't install the Nvidia driver.  I'm not at all happy with the 'nv'
performance of the machine in Blender and my attempts to get nouveau
working in Squeeze have so far been unsuccessful.  I'm considering
"upgrading" to sid and enabling the experimental repositories to see
if I can remedy the situation since nouveau has been incorporated in
to the 2.6.33 kernel, which probably won't make it in to testing until
after squeeze is released as stable.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzc5NQ

I actually considered switching the OS to Fedora, just because it is
so cutting edge, but Fedora dropped the PPC architecture in 13.  Maybe
I could bring the laptop to a CABAL and seeing if the assembled gurus
could help me make the machine happy with nouveau.

Ed

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