[gentoo-user] nvidia-legacy-drivers problems/questions

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   I'm doing updates to my dad's Gentoo machine 350 miles away. It
pretty much hasn't been touched in about a year as per his request.
However we agreed it was time to move forward so I've done the
gcc-4.1.1 upgrade and rebuilt the machine completely. At the command
line from here things look like they are running with the new kernel.
ivtv is up for MythTV recording. I don't know how to tell what state
his screen is in since he isn't home to look at it. However I seem to
be having problems with the NVidia drivers so I'm looking for some
help.

   When I first built the machine I installed nvidia-drivers. After
rebooting with the new 2.6.18-gentoo-r4 kernel nvidia was loaded but
got a message in dmesg telling me that the card is supported by
nvidia-legacy-drivers:

<SNIP>
NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X GPU installed in this system is
NVRM:  supported through the NVIDIA Legacy drivers. Please
NVRM:  visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
NVRM:  information.  The 1.0-9742 NVIDIA driver will ignore
NVRM:  this GPU.  Continuing probe...
NVRM: No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!
<SNIP>

   I then removed that NVidia package and emerged
nvidia-drivers-legacy. It seemed to emerge but I saw this message when
building it:

<SNIP>
test -e include/linux/autoconf.h -a -e include/config/auto.conf || (
         \
        echo;                                                           \
        echo "  ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid.";               \
        echo "         include/linux/autoconf.h or
include/config/auto.conf are missing.";\
        echo "         Run 'make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel
src to fix it.";  \
        echo;                                                           \
        /bin/false)
<SNIP>

   However I think the driver does load as I see this at the end of dmesg:

<SNIP>
Adding 1172264k swap on /dev/sda5.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1172264k
eth0:  setting full-duplex.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNK4] enabled at IRQ 5
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> Link [LNK4] -> GSI 5 (level,
low) -> IRQ 5
NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 Kernel Module  1.0-7184  Tue Aug  1
18:38:58 PDT 2006
gandalf ~ #
<SNIP>

   The problem I seem to be having right now is with xdm. It stops OK,
but when I try to start it I get these messages:

<SNIP>
gandalf ~ # /etc/init.d/xdm stop
  * Stopping xdm ...
               [ ok ]
gandalf ~ # /etc/init.d/xdm status
 * status:  stopped
gandalf ~ # /etc/init.d/xdm start
  * Setting up xdm ...
/sbin/start-stop-daemon: stat /usr/bin/xdm: No such file or directory
(No such file or directory)
 * ERROR: could not start the Display Manager...
xdm: no process killed
              [ ok ]
gandalf ~ # /etc/init.d/xdm status
 * status:  started
gandalf ~ #
<SNIP>

   So it seems, from 350 miles away, that xdm is stopping and
starting, but I get error messages. What's up with that?

   What I'm really wondering right now is what is being displayed on
his screen? Is there a login window? Seems like maybe it's working:

gandalf ~ # ps aux | grep xdm
root     11983  0.0  0.1   1604   524 pts/0    R+   17:38   0:00 grep
--colour=auto xdm
gandalf ~ #

but what is that error message above telling me? What else can I do
from here to investigate the state of this remote machine?

   Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Mark
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