Driver for nVidia Geforce 6150LE

[Mike Clarke]

On Saturday 06 June 2009, Jerry wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Jun 2009 15:00:48 +0100
>
> Mike Clarke <jmc-freebsd2 at milibyte.co.uk> wrote:

> >No, in the absence of a 64 bit driver from Nvidia you'd need to use
> >the nv driver included in the xorg-drivers port. I had quite a
> >struggle to get the nv driver to give me a 1280x1024 display.
>
> OK, exactly how did you get it to work?

My initial attempt with "Xorg -configure" and the nv driver resulted in 
me getting just an 800x600 display. I was able to fix this by 
adding 'Modes "1280x1024"' to the display subsection of the screen 
section but this resulted in the entire display being shifted about 50 
pixels to the right. I couldn't correct this with the auto-adjust 
button on the monitor but after fiddling around with xvidtune I was 
able to get a modeline for something which looked acceptable but I 
wasn't too happy with it because the monitor was no longer able to show 
full details about resolution and frequency in it's on screen status 
display.

The nvidia driver wasn't without it's problems either but I got there in 
the end. Initially I tried the nvidia-driver port but all I got was a 
black screen with a single row of white pixels across the top of the 
screen. After a bit of trial and error I found that I could get a 
working display by using portdowngrade to revert to version 169.12. 
Unfortunately after the upgrade of xorg in January this old version of 
nvidia-driver failed to work and gave me the black screen with white 
dots and I got error messages about being unable to load nvidia_drv.so. 
No solution to this was forthcoming but I found that the 
nvidia-driver-96 port would work. Although this is a much older driver 
the port is still maintained so I should be less likely to hit 
compatibility problems in the way I did by using a downgraded version 
of the newer driver.

> That port version is several versions old. Perhaps the maintainer
> will update to the latest version. According to the change-log, it
> corrects quite a few problems.

I'm hoping that the problems fixed in the latest version relate to 
issues with the newer and/or more powerful graphics chips. So far I've 
not had any problems with this driver.

> >The lack of a 64bit Nvidia driver was one of the reasons I installed
> >the i386 version of FreeBSD on this 64bit platform.
>
> Unfortunately, I will probably have to do that also. Since it is not
> going to be used for anything critical, it probably does not matter.
> It would be nice if FreeBSD gets around to supporting 64 bit drivers
> like this so that a user could take advantage of a 64 bit system.

Well I certainly don't seem to be missing out on anything by using i386 
but I only have 2GB memory anyway, it would be a different matter if I 
had 4GB or more.

-- 
Mike Clarke