Having issues with the nvidia driver on my box

[Michael Powell]

Lowell Gilbert wrote:

> af300wsm at gmail.com writes:
> 
>> For several reasons, one of which was to use the nvidia driver for my
>> board, I switched from amd64 to i386. So, I installed the driver and
>> although things are working I'm getting this on console 0:
>>
>> NVRM: AGP cannot be enabled on this combination of the amd CPU and OS
>> kernel NVRM: kernel upgrade recommended
> 
> Do you have AGP in the kernel?
> 
>> So, when I installed the nvidia driver I said to enable AGP. (Figuring
>> only  that this is an AGP board, why not?)
> 
> If you say 'no' to that, I think it will use its own AGP driver instead
> of the native one.

This reminds me of a situation I had on an old KT-400a chipset. Some
VIA chipsets had a weak signal condition on one of the AGP pins. The
way to make it work was to remove device agp from the kernel, install
the nvidia-drivers, and place Option "NvAgp" "1" in the xorg.conf.

I do not believe the OP scenario is a match, as his is working while
mine would only show colored bars and trash on the screen. I don't
recall which is the default, but here are the options available:
Option "NvAgp" "0" Disable AGP
Option "NvAgp" "1" Use NVIDIA's AGP GART Driver
Option "NvAgp" "2" Use the OS AGP GART driver (agp.ko)
Option "NvAgp" "3" Attempt "2", fall back to "1"

Perhaps placing an appropriate choice in Section "Device" will
nuke the error message. The OP can probably discern which AGP
is being used from the Xorg.0.log file and choose accordingly.

 
>> ps in case it matters, my board is rather "old." I purchased it 4
>> years ago  and as I'm not a gamer, it suffices quite nicely. Here's
>> the driver I had  to install for support of this chip:
>>
>> nvidia-driver-96.43.07 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for
>> hardware  OpenGL ren
[snip]

The nvidia-driver ports being broken up into sub-ports because NVidia
broke their monolithic into "Legacy" or "New" necessitates the need
to dig out of the comments in the Makefiles which port matches which
hardware. Since the above mentioned version rev matches one of the
port installs I am going to just assume that it is the right one - after
all it probably wouldn't work at all if it wasn't.

-Mike