Nouveau - Oct 2013 - GeForce 8400 GS (follow-up)

Hello again, everyone.


I'm the same "Fernando Negro" that sent a message entitled
"GeForce 8400
GS", three days ago. (
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-October/014660.html)

I'm sorry for having to open a new topic, in here... But, due to all the
experiments with installing new distros and drivers on my computer, I ended
up loosing access to the e-mail account that I used to send the previous
message. And, so, I'm writing again, with a new e-mail address...

Responding to everyone that responded to my message... (Ilia, Emil, and
poma...)

My particular card is a PCI Express "Gainward" GeForce 8400 GS, 512MB
DDR3,
passively cooled (with only a heat sink). And, not the ASUS card, with the
same NVIDIA chip.

I have no fan in my card.

And, since I already took a fan from inside my computer, because of the
noise it made, I'm most worried about having a component inside of it that
may overheat it, overall. (Especially, since I leave in a country where
it's pretty hot in the Summer...)

I was not aware that thermal management was already available in nouveau.
So, I guess that could solve the possible problem that I foresee - since
that, I don't "exercise" (and consequently heat) my card a lot...

The thing is, that, although I thought I had already run nouveau in it, I
was, after all, only running a generic vesa driver, every time before I
installed the proprietary drivers... And, I suppose that the wrong idea I
had, of having been able to run nouveau already, was either: due to error
messages that appeared, before I added the "nomodeset" parameter in
the
kernel line (that I didn't know that made it impossible for nouveau to
load); or due to having used a previous NVIDIA card that, maybe, could
already run nouveau, before it started malfunctioning...

Anyway, I decided to finally seriously try running the nouveau driver in
it. But, after many failed attempts, I was, unfortunately, not able to...
And, I suspect the main cause for it to be the particular brand of my card,
that doesn't seem to be very good. (Since that, I know of other people that
have the same NVIDIA chip, and that are able to run nouveau on their
cards...)

The report of my experience, for anyone interested in it, can be read here:
http://trisquel.info/en/forum/nouveau-mi-eq-overflowing


Thank you very much, all of you, for your help.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/attachments/20131006/3c870a9f/attachment.html>

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 6:31 AM, Fernando Negro <f3rn4nd0.n3gr0 at
gmail.com> wrote:
> The thing is, that, although I thought I had already run nouveau in it, I
> was, after all, only running a generic vesa driver, every time before I
> installed the proprietary drivers... And, I suppose that the wrong idea I
> had, of having been able to run nouveau already, was either: due to error
> messages that appeared, before I added the "nomodeset" parameter
in the
> kernel line (that I didn't know that made it impossible for nouveau to
> load); or due to having used a previous NVIDIA card that, maybe, could
> already run nouveau, before it started malfunctioning...
>
> Anyway, I decided to finally seriously try running the nouveau driver in
it.
> But, after many failed attempts, I was, unfortunately, not able to... And,
I
> suspect the main cause for it to be the particular brand of my card, that
> doesn't seem to be very good. (Since that, I know of other people that
have
> the same NVIDIA chip, and that are able to run nouveau on their cards...)
>
> The report of my experience, for anyone interested in it, can be read here:
> http://trisquel.info/en/forum/nouveau-mi-eq-overflowing
>
>
> Thank you very much, all of you, for your help.
The logs in the post show that you're using a 3.2.0 kernel, which is
several years old. Might I recommend trying something a bit more
recent? Like 3.11.

  -ilia

Hello, again, ilia.


I already followed that same suggestion, that someone, in that forum 
that I linked to, made 
(http://trisquel.info/en/forum/nouveau-mi-eq-overflowing#comment-43713) 
and tried all sorts of different kernels - including the 3.11.3-gnu one 
- with no results.

The best thing that I could get was the boot splash screen with kernel 
3.4.64-gnu1, and then a black screen.

Different kernels didn't solve the problem, and the message that 
appeared in the Xorg log, with the best trial that I mentioned, was 
still the same that I initially reported in that forum.

I, unfortunately, ended up having to revert to the proprietary drivers, 
and lost my patience to try anything else... I managed to find a version 
of a distro where I can get the card to work, with no problems - so I'll 
stick to that, for the time being.

I may try this free driver again, in the future. But, for now, I have an 
urgency in having this computer functional.


Thank you very much, all of you, for your help and your efforts, and 
good luck with your project.