Personal computing discussed

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rchaneberg
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Help a Noob.... please.

Thu Sep 20, 2007 9:49 am

I just installed Fedora 7, as my first Linux install, and I can't figure out how to install my nvidia 8800 drivers.

I've edited my X-config as it says too on the nvidia website, but when i boot with the changed config, it says it can't initialize it.
 
bitvector
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Thu Sep 20, 2007 1:14 pm

So, I assume you edited your xorg.conf to use the "nvidia" video driver, but did you actually install the driver files? There are a variety of ways to do so, but the best way is to use Fedora packages and repositories made for Fedora (rather than trying to install manually with nvidia's instructions, which will require manual updating on every kernel upgrade). Here's how...

Livna provides a repository with Fedora packages for the binary Nvidia drivers. To install them, do the following:

* Bring up a shell as root and run the following commands:
* rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm (this will install the repository related info in your yum directory so yum will now be able to use livna packages).
* rpm –import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
* yum install kmod-nvidia (this will install the driver).

That should be all you need to do assuming the current Nvidia drivers support your card properly.
 
rchaneberg
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Thu Sep 20, 2007 4:29 pm

Thank you very much, that was exactly what I needed.
 
rchaneberg
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:37 am

'nother quick question, I've been trying to get flash player to work in Fedora 7 64-bit, and can't seem to get it to work, anyone know anything to do?
 
just brew it!
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:49 am

rchaneberg wrote:
'nother quick question, I've been trying to get flash player to work in Fedora 7 64-bit, and can't seem to get it to work, anyone know anything to do?

64-bit Linux browser plugins for proprietary stuff like flash are still problematic.

I got flash working on my Fedora 64-bit system by installing the 32-bit version of Firefox, and the 32-bit flash plugin. Since x86-64 runs 32-bit apps just fine, you don't lose any functionality by doing this.
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bitvector
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:59 am

rchaneberg wrote:
'nother quick question, I've been trying to get flash player to work in Fedora 7 64-bit, and can't seem to get it to work, anyone know anything to do?

Like JBI said, just running a 32-bit browser is a perfectly valid solution (the best right now, IMO). In fact, that's what people tend to do on 64-bit Windows, too.

The other solution is nspluginwrapper, which tries to run the 32-bit flash plugin in a wrapper in the 64-bit browser. I've found this solution to be a bit... crashy. Maybe it got better, though. If you care to try your luck, this page has Fedora-specific info on nspluginwrapper (including rpm sources): http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f7-tips.php#flash
 
king_kilr
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 9:27 am

Is the nsplugginwrapper related to ndiswrapper(the wifi driver wrapper)?
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Nitrodist
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 9:48 am

just brew it! wrote:
rchaneberg wrote:
'nother quick question, I've been trying to get flash player to work in Fedora 7 64-bit, and can't seem to get it to work, anyone know anything to do?

64-bit Linux browser plugins for proprietary stuff like flash are still problematic.

I got flash working on my Fedora 64-bit system by installing the 32-bit version of Firefox, and the 32-bit flash plugin. Since x86-64 runs 32-bit apps just fine, you don't lose any functionality by doing this.


What! I didn't know you could still run 32bit based code on a 64bit system..
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just brew it!
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:32 am

Nitrodist wrote:
What! I didn't know you could still run 32bit based code on a 64bit system..

As long as you've got the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed, 32-bit code runs just fine. It even runs at full speed, since it is done in hardware (not software emulation).

Note that this is a feature of x86-64; it is not true of other 64-bit architectures. In general, it is also not true for device drivers, since they need to talk directly to the (64-bit) OS kernel. But applications should be fine.
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rchaneberg
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 10:46 am

Thanks guys, haven't trid any yet, but I will when I get back from class
 
bitvector
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:29 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Note that this is a feature of x86-64; it is not true of other 64-bit architectures.

It's also true of 64-bit PowerPC.

king_kilr wrote:
Is the nsplugginwrapper related to ndiswrapper(the wifi driver wrapper)?

Not really. ndiswrapper lets you run Windows wifi drivers under Linux. nspluginwrapper lets you run browser plugins that use the Netscape 4 plugin API (NPAPI) under a browser that wouldn't normally be compatible with the plugin (e.g. i386 Linux plugin on i386 FreeBSD Firefox or i386 Linux plugin on amd64 Firefox). The plugin is normally loaded and executed in the address space of the browser, so it has to be compiled code for the same architecture and platform. nspluginwrapper provides a little shim that executes in the browser and spawns the plugin in another process which talks to the shim using interprocess communication. In some scenarios, the plugin is executed in an emulator (like QEMU), if the machine is unable to run 32-bit x86 code (running the i386 Linux plugin on PowerPC Linux, for example).
 
just brew it!
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Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:38 pm

bitvector wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Note that this is a feature of x86-64; it is not true of other 64-bit architectures.

It's also true of 64-bit PowerPC.

Ahh, I didn't know that!
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SecretSquirrel
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Sat Sep 29, 2007 9:13 am

just brew it! wrote:
bitvector wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Note that this is a feature of x86-64; it is not true of other 64-bit architectures.

It's also true of 64-bit PowerPC.

Ahh, I didn't know that!


It's also true of Solaris, SPARC or x86.

--SS
 
just brew it!
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Sat Sep 29, 2007 10:39 am

SecretSquirrel wrote:
It's also true of Solaris, SPARC or x86.

x86 is what we were talking about originally, and Solaris is an OS not a CPU architecture...

But yeah, I stand corrected. I guess the capability is more common than I thought.
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SecretSquirrel
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Sat Sep 29, 2007 10:07 pm

just brew it! wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
It's also true of Solaris, SPARC or x86.

x86 is what we were talking about originally, and Solaris is an OS not a CPU architecture...

But yeah, I stand corrected. I guess the capability is more common than I thought.


Yeah, I missed the OS vs processor thing. But the Sun SPARC chips support running 32 bit code. Dunno about MIPS or Alpha though.

--SS
 
nightmorph
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Sat Sep 29, 2007 11:24 pm

--
Last edited by nightmorph on Fri Sep 20, 2013 3:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
just brew it!
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Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:45 am

nightmorph wrote:
About the only 64-bit CPU I can think of offhand that can not run 32-bit code is Alpha. It's purely 64-bit. Possibly Wikipedia can list a few others.

Well, Itanium had x86 support, but it was abysmally slow, to the point of being essentially useless. So maybe that counts as not being able to run 32-bit code? :lol:
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bitvector
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Sun Sep 30, 2007 1:51 am

nightmorph wrote:
Also, it's not true that 32-bit device drivers can't be run by a 64-bit kernel; quite the contrary. Wireless networking drivers in particular come to mind -- think ndiswrapper.

No, ndiswrapper doesn't let you use 32-bit drivers in a 64-bit kernel -- when you use ndiswrapper on a 64-bit kernel, you need to use 64-bit windows drivers.

This is covered in the ndiswrapper FAQ:
Can I use 32-bit Windows driver in 64-bit mode?

No.
 
nightmorph
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Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:03 pm

--
Last edited by nightmorph on Fri Sep 20, 2013 3:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
just brew it!
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Sun Sep 30, 2007 1:13 pm

nightmorph wrote:
bitvector wrote:
[ndiswrapper]

I stand corrected.

The problem with device drivers is that -- by their very nature -- they need to be able to access the full physical address range of the system in order to perform I/O. A 32-bit driver can't access 64-bit physical addresses, because it isn't even aware of them.

While it might theoretically be possible to work around this with some sort of wrapper that double-buffers the transfers between the two address spaces, this would be a horrible kludge, and would also have significant negative impacts on performance.
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zer0
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Mon Dec 17, 2007 12:54 pm

bitvector wrote:
So, I assume you edited your xorg.conf to use the "nvidia" video driver, but did you actually install the driver files? There are a variety of ways to do so, but the best way is to use Fedora packages and repositories made for Fedora (rather than trying to install manually with nvidia's instructions, which will require manual updating on every kernel upgrade). Here's how...

Livna provides a repository with Fedora packages for the binary Nvidia drivers. To install them, do the following:

* Bring up a shell as root and run the following commands:
* rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm (this will install the repository related info in your yum directory so yum will now be able to use livna packages).
* rpm –import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
* yum install kmod-nvidia (this will install the driver).

That should be all you need to do assuming the current Nvidia drivers support your card properly.


Will this work for Fedora 8 32-bit as well? I just installed Fedora Core 8 and I've been having problems getting the driver to run properly. (I'm also new to Linux)
I think the vast majority of people who tell you they have a virus actually mean 'I keep my pictures in the system32 folder and occasionally delete things at random'.

"it boots up so fast the desktop icons fly right off the screen..."
 
bitvector
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Mon Dec 17, 2007 1:18 pm

zer0 wrote:
Will this work for Fedora 8 32-bit as well? I just installed Fedora Core 8 and I've been having problems getting the driver to run properly. (I'm also new to Linux)

Sure, but for the second step install http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm rather than 7. Go to the Livna wiki and take a look at their FAQ for more info.
 
zer0
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:41 am

That didn't seem to do it...

I tried that, but I got an error for each file. I forgot to take the copy of the error with me to work today so I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of:

update file something-something-i586-something conflicts with kernel file something-something-i686-something


Now I realize that my overly technical jargon above could be a bit overwhelming, but I get the impression that the drivers were for an older version of the kernel.

I'm completely new to Linux, let alone Fedora 8, so if anyone has any idea how I can install the damn nvidia driver for my 7050PV integrated graphics on Fedora 8 without having to manually edit xorg.conf I would greatly appreciate it. This has been driving me crazy for about a week now...
I think the vast majority of people who tell you they have a virus actually mean 'I keep my pictures in the system32 folder and occasionally delete things at random'.

"it boots up so fast the desktop icons fly right off the screen..."
 
just brew it!
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:50 am

Configuration files in Linux are kind of a "good news, bad news" deal.

The good news is, when stuff goes wrong you can almost always fix it by editing the appropriate configuration file.

The bad news is, you do have to learn how to edit configuration files (sometimes from a text console session, especially when dealing with the bootloader or xorg.conf).

Still, I'll take it any day over Windows' baroque spiderweb of opaque registry keys.
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notfred
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:19 am

This is one of the areas where Ubuntu really shines. Most of the time it just works fine - in this particular case it should throw up a "Restricted Drivers" message offering the binary nVidia driver, then download and install it (including the changes in xorg.conf) automatically. If it does mess up, you can still go in and hand edit the config files to fix it. I've found the Red Hat based Linux systems seem to require a lot of knowing which particular config file to edit or Red Hat specific config command to run, so I would recommend Ubuntu over Fedora for someone new to Linux.
 
zer0
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:34 am

Thats what I originally was going to do, but I work with a couple of guys who are Red Hat Certified (RHCT&E) who have offered to assist me in my attempt to learn more about linux. They recommenced Fedora because as a Red Hat based distro, they said they would be better suited to help. Unfortunately they haven't been able to offer a solution to this particular problem.

Apparently I broke their golden rule about staying one version behind, which supposedly guarantees that there will be available drivers, etc. Of course, they didn't tell me about that golden rule until after I installed the latest version... lol
I think the vast majority of people who tell you they have a virus actually mean 'I keep my pictures in the system32 folder and occasionally delete things at random'.

"it boots up so fast the desktop icons fly right off the screen..."
 
bitvector
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:33 pm

zer0 wrote:
That didn't seem to do it...

I tried that, but I got an error for each file. I forgot to take the copy of the error with me to work today so I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of:

update file something-something-i586-something conflicts with kernel file something-something-i686-something

Okay, without the exact message, this sounds like a known bug with Fedora that has been around since FC6. I'm surprised it's still occurring (okay, maybe not). Apparently the installer incorrectly gives some machines the i586 version of the kernel instead of the i686 version*. The livna modules require the i686 kernel.

Download the following script:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6C ... nel-fix.sh

Make a brand new empty directory in your home directory or in tmp (e.g. mkdir /tmp/scriptdir). Put the file, kernel-fix.sh, into the directory, change into the directory, and run the script. Something like:
mkdir -p /tmp/scriptdir
cd /tmp/scriptdir
wget -O kernel-fix.sh 'http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=kernel-fix.sh'
sh kernel-fix.sh

It should check to see if you have the i586 kernel and replace it with the i686 kernel. It will ask you for your root password at most twice (to install packages). If that was the cause, after that, the livna rpms shouldn't have the same conflict.

* I'm assuming you're not installing this onto an original Pentium, Pentium MMX or K6 machine (mid 90s-era processors), because those would actually require i586. Anything Pentium II, K6-2 or newer will work with i686 (e.g. almost anything made this decade).
 
zer0
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:56 pm

I'll give it a shot when I get home from work and see how it goes. The CPU shouldn't be a problem, its an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 65nm Brisbane 2.5 GHz. Anyway I'll let you guys know how it turns out. Thanks again for the help.
I think the vast majority of people who tell you they have a virus actually mean 'I keep my pictures in the system32 folder and occasionally delete things at random'.

"it boots up so fast the desktop icons fly right off the screen..."
 
zer0
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Tue Dec 18, 2007 10:55 pm

Well, that seems to have done it. After following your instructions I went back and tried to install the drivers through the livna directory and everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks for the help guys.

By the way... I may never be productive on this machine again thanks to Wobbly Windows and the Desktop Cube. So much for this being a learning experience... lol
I think the vast majority of people who tell you they have a virus actually mean 'I keep my pictures in the system32 folder and occasionally delete things at random'.

"it boots up so fast the desktop icons fly right off the screen..."

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