[Solved] MX-16, nouveau, and GeForce4, confusion
Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2019 7:33 pm
Hello MX forum! This may be my first post here. But I've lurked here for years and have been active on the antiX forum. This is mostly a question about MX but I also have the same questions with antiX. Here goes ...
I’ve done a lot of reading and testing over the past few days and I’ve learned a lot about the nouveau driver and Xorg and kernels, etc. But I still don’t understand why the nouveau driver does not work for my hardware with the latest versions of antiX and MX. Can someone help me understand what is actually happening behind the scenes that will either allow the nouveau driver to be installed successfully or not even get loaded? I’ve not been able to find a clear write up about how this works and I’ve read most of nouveau.freedesktop.org already.
I have an old HP zv5000 Athlon XP laptop that I have been setting up with MX Linux. I started with MX-16 and it loaded fine and the screen looked good. But when I tried to play YouTube video using SMTube the video was choppy and out of sync. I have experienced this before when I was trying to get antiX-17 working on my old P-III. That machine plays video fine on antiX-16 but not on antiX-17, on the same hardware,
But I was surprised that this HP Athlon XP 3000+ would not be better at playing YouTube than the P-III. This is a P4 class machine and was made for Windows XP and runs at between 800 and 1600 Mhz and has 1280 MB Ram. That is twice the speed of the P-III and more than twice the memory. It also has the next generation of the Nvidia GeForce (the P-III has a GeForce2 NV11, this HP Athlon has a GeForce4 NV17).
I also tried installing antiX-17 on this machine. It installed fine and the screen is fine but the same results with YouTube. Choppy and out of sync.
After some research I found that the nouveau driver was not being loaded. And without the nouveau kernel module loaded Xorg would not work with it’s nouveau driver either. When I looked at the P-III system the nouveau kernel module is loading and Xorg loads it’s nouveau driver and ends up supporting the GeForce2 graphics card. That system was running antiX-16, not 16.1 or 16.2, but plain 16.
I grabbed my USB with Live antiX-16 and installed that on this HP Athlon. But I ended up with the same result. Bad video and no nouveau driver. I looked closer and found I had antiX-16.2 installed. It’s the same kernel and same Xorg but for some reason it did not load the nouveau driver. So I setup another USB with plain antiX-16 and tried that. Viola! antiX-16 loads the nouveau driver and plays YouTube videos in 360p just fine. Not choppy at all. When I look at the logs everything looks good and the GeForce4 graphics is supported. Hmm. Why does it work in antiX-16 but not in antiX-16.2?
I decided to try MX-15. When I loaded the live MX-15 I looked at lsmod, inxi, and Xorg.log and everything looked good with the nouveau drivers. I played some YouTube video with VLC at 360p and it was fine. So, I have MX-15 and antiX-16 playing YouTube video and using the nouveau drivers. But I can’t duplicate this in either MX-16 or antix-16.2, or antiX-17. Why?
My goal was to get this laptop setup with MX Linux so I could replace an older Dell P-III-450 laptop that I use for playing music in my office. I thought I could use at least MX-16, if not MX-17/18. But I had to settle for MX-15 and I’m confused as to why. MX-16 uses an earlier kernel than antiX-16.2 or antiX-17 and uses the same Xorg as antiX-16. I thought that would work out for me, but so far it doesn’t work. Clearly, there is more to this puzzle than the kernel and Xorg version.
I decided to experiment with upgrading MX-15. I was worried that if I ran “dist-upgrade” I would end up with bad video again, thinking that MX-16 gives me bad video and MX-15 gives me good video. I ran into problems updating SMPlayer and SMTube from MX-15 due to some repository issues. I finally figured out that the sources list files needed to be corrected to point to the correct servers. Once I did that I was able to do a full dist-upgrade and I ended up installing the latest SMPLayer and SMTube along with SeaMonkey, Palemoon and Remmina. I tested the video after the upgrades and it played and looked fine. I checked the logs and the nouveau driver was loaded and Xorg was using it.
When I rebooted I had no grub image and the login image was also blank. The desktop wallpaper was also gone. I had experienced this before and was able to find the new paths to the images and edit the startup files. MX did a couple more “dist-upgrades” and I noticed that one of the last upgrades were for the linux-headers files. Again, I was worried that this might kill my video setup and I’d end up with bad video again. But I tested it after it finished and the video is fine. When I rebooted I had MX-16 Metamorphosis as indicated from the Welcome screen. But my video was still good.
So, now I have MX-16 installed, by way of a MX-15 install and a full upgrade. But unlike the direct install of MX-16 from the USB media I now have good video working with the nouveau driver on the GeForce4 graphics hardware.
I learned a lot about installing and updating MX-15 but I am still confused as to why the nouveau driver does not load with MX-16 from the USB media, or on antiX-16.2 or antiX-17. Is it even possible to get the nouveau driver installed on those other versions? Could I do something similar with antiX-17 and start with antiX-16 and then do a full upgrade to antiX-17? Or is there something about those versions that just won’t support this GeForce4 NV17M hardware? And if that is the case then why do I now have a version of MX-16 working on this hardware?
Confused!
Seaken64
I’ve done a lot of reading and testing over the past few days and I’ve learned a lot about the nouveau driver and Xorg and kernels, etc. But I still don’t understand why the nouveau driver does not work for my hardware with the latest versions of antiX and MX. Can someone help me understand what is actually happening behind the scenes that will either allow the nouveau driver to be installed successfully or not even get loaded? I’ve not been able to find a clear write up about how this works and I’ve read most of nouveau.freedesktop.org already.
I have an old HP zv5000 Athlon XP laptop that I have been setting up with MX Linux. I started with MX-16 and it loaded fine and the screen looked good. But when I tried to play YouTube video using SMTube the video was choppy and out of sync. I have experienced this before when I was trying to get antiX-17 working on my old P-III. That machine plays video fine on antiX-16 but not on antiX-17, on the same hardware,
But I was surprised that this HP Athlon XP 3000+ would not be better at playing YouTube than the P-III. This is a P4 class machine and was made for Windows XP and runs at between 800 and 1600 Mhz and has 1280 MB Ram. That is twice the speed of the P-III and more than twice the memory. It also has the next generation of the Nvidia GeForce (the P-III has a GeForce2 NV11, this HP Athlon has a GeForce4 NV17).
I also tried installing antiX-17 on this machine. It installed fine and the screen is fine but the same results with YouTube. Choppy and out of sync.
After some research I found that the nouveau driver was not being loaded. And without the nouveau kernel module loaded Xorg would not work with it’s nouveau driver either. When I looked at the P-III system the nouveau kernel module is loading and Xorg loads it’s nouveau driver and ends up supporting the GeForce2 graphics card. That system was running antiX-16, not 16.1 or 16.2, but plain 16.
I grabbed my USB with Live antiX-16 and installed that on this HP Athlon. But I ended up with the same result. Bad video and no nouveau driver. I looked closer and found I had antiX-16.2 installed. It’s the same kernel and same Xorg but for some reason it did not load the nouveau driver. So I setup another USB with plain antiX-16 and tried that. Viola! antiX-16 loads the nouveau driver and plays YouTube videos in 360p just fine. Not choppy at all. When I look at the logs everything looks good and the GeForce4 graphics is supported. Hmm. Why does it work in antiX-16 but not in antiX-16.2?
I decided to try MX-15. When I loaded the live MX-15 I looked at lsmod, inxi, and Xorg.log and everything looked good with the nouveau drivers. I played some YouTube video with VLC at 360p and it was fine. So, I have MX-15 and antiX-16 playing YouTube video and using the nouveau drivers. But I can’t duplicate this in either MX-16 or antix-16.2, or antiX-17. Why?
My goal was to get this laptop setup with MX Linux so I could replace an older Dell P-III-450 laptop that I use for playing music in my office. I thought I could use at least MX-16, if not MX-17/18. But I had to settle for MX-15 and I’m confused as to why. MX-16 uses an earlier kernel than antiX-16.2 or antiX-17 and uses the same Xorg as antiX-16. I thought that would work out for me, but so far it doesn’t work. Clearly, there is more to this puzzle than the kernel and Xorg version.
I decided to experiment with upgrading MX-15. I was worried that if I ran “dist-upgrade” I would end up with bad video again, thinking that MX-16 gives me bad video and MX-15 gives me good video. I ran into problems updating SMPlayer and SMTube from MX-15 due to some repository issues. I finally figured out that the sources list files needed to be corrected to point to the correct servers. Once I did that I was able to do a full dist-upgrade and I ended up installing the latest SMPLayer and SMTube along with SeaMonkey, Palemoon and Remmina. I tested the video after the upgrades and it played and looked fine. I checked the logs and the nouveau driver was loaded and Xorg was using it.
When I rebooted I had no grub image and the login image was also blank. The desktop wallpaper was also gone. I had experienced this before and was able to find the new paths to the images and edit the startup files. MX did a couple more “dist-upgrades” and I noticed that one of the last upgrades were for the linux-headers files. Again, I was worried that this might kill my video setup and I’d end up with bad video again. But I tested it after it finished and the video is fine. When I rebooted I had MX-16 Metamorphosis as indicated from the Welcome screen. But my video was still good.
So, now I have MX-16 installed, by way of a MX-15 install and a full upgrade. But unlike the direct install of MX-16 from the USB media I now have good video working with the nouveau driver on the GeForce4 graphics hardware.
I learned a lot about installing and updating MX-15 but I am still confused as to why the nouveau driver does not load with MX-16 from the USB media, or on antiX-16.2 or antiX-17. Is it even possible to get the nouveau driver installed on those other versions? Could I do something similar with antiX-17 and start with antiX-16 and then do a full upgrade to antiX-17? Or is there something about those versions that just won’t support this GeForce4 NV17M hardware? And if that is the case then why do I now have a version of MX-16 working on this hardware?
Confused!
Seaken64