[olug] Hardy Upgrade

[Dan Linder]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Russell Monaghan <russellmonaghan at cox.net>wrote:

> Thanks for the info. I'm an impatient person when it comes to new
> software, so I started the upgrade about 15 minutes after posting my
> message. It seems to have worked ok so far. I can see graphical stuff,
> so that's definitely something to be thankful for.
>

(I didn't want to hijack this thread earlier, but since Russell has taken
the plunge to Hardy, I'll add some thoughts...)

My home workstation is a testbed for many things, one of them is running the
latest Ibex betas.  Everything has continued to work quite well with the
exception of Amarok4 and my tri-monitor NVidia setup.

The Amarok4 thing might be my fault - I need to remove it completely and
re-install it, then re-setup my podcasts (I tried a migration script someone
wrote in a forum that I don't think did everything 100%)...

NVidia has been another story.  In my Hardy configuration, I ran the NVidia
compiled drivers to drive my dual-head 8600, and I used the plain old "nv"
drivers to drive the older GeForce2 video card.  That all worked
well....until. :-)

Apparently Ubuntu has enabled the "xen" support in the -generic kernel.
That causes the NVidia installer to exit saying they don't support Xen in
the kernel.  After a bit of digging, I found that Ubuntu was now packaging
NVidia drivers (nvidia-177 for my 8600, and nvidia-96 for the GeForce2) so I
installed them.  After fighting for two evenings, and only getting the 8600
to come up, I found that there is some bug with the nvidia-96 drivers that
causes them to crash badly if you have 4+GB RAM.

That revalation was made only this weekend, so I haven't had much time to
triage my options.  I need to see if booting with the command line option to
limit RAM will help.  (What is that?)  After that, there have been some
patches that fix the NVidia driver and allow it to compile even if it
detects Xen. Finally, I am going to try to recompile my kernel from source
without Xen and see if the NVidia drivers will compile.

Aahh, the fun of trying to live on the bleeding/alpha edge! :-)

Dan

-- 
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who can watch the watchmen?) -- from the
Satires of Juvenal
"I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov (Author)
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