CentOS - May 2007 - Problems setting up legacy NVidia card

Hi,

Here's my video card:

$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV15 [GeForce2 
GTS/Pro] (rev a3)

Until now, I've used it on Slackware (10.0, 10.2, 11.0) and Debian 
(Sarge, Etch), and I've always managed to set it up fine.

First, I checked if there were any precompiled nvidia drivers in the 
various repos (rpmforge, ...), but there seemed to be only recent drivers.

So I went to the nvidia site and downloaded the corresponding driver for 
my card:

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7185-pkg1.run

I also updated my kernel, and then 'yum install kernel-devel gcc'.

After doing this, it was time for 'init 3'.

I started the installer:

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7185-pkg1.run

I went through the steps like I've done a few times before, and it 
didn't complain about anything.

I then opened /etc/X11/xorg.conf, searched for the Driver section and 
replaced "nv" by "nvidia".

To be on the safe side, I rebooted. (I've had some strange GDM problems 
before when simply doing init 5).

My default screen resolution on my 17'' flat monitor is 1024x768. (The 
CentOS installer defaulted to 1280x1024, but I manually edited xorg.conf 
to change it). Now, after starting X with the "nvidia" driver,
curiously
I had a resolution that looked more like 800x600 (and curiously reminded 
me of a default Windows 95 install :o))

I opened a console with Ctrl-Alt-F6, opened /etc/X11/xorg.conf to look 
for a mistake... and noticed something strange. xorg.conf looks now 
curiously amputated. Here's the whole file, or what's left of it:

--8<-------------------------------------------------
# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc105"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "ch"
	Option	    "XkbVariant" "fr"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "nvidia"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	DefaultDepth     16
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
		Modes "1024x768"
	EndSubSection
EndSection
--8<-------------------------------------------------

This leaves me a bit clueless.

Where has my original xorg.conf (the long version) gone? Is there a way 
to get it back somehow? And where does this new - and severely truncated 
xorg.conf file come from?

Any suggestions?

Niki
-- 
Dyslexics have more fnu.

On 5/28/07, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
>
> Where has my original xorg.conf (the long version) gone? Is there a way
> to get it back somehow? And where does this new - and severely truncated
> xorg.conf file come from?
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Niki
Your monitor is probably not being identified by X and therefore X is
not using appropriate parameters.  Certain monitors have a bug which
causes delivery of incorrect EDID information to X when probed. But
this is rather rare. Start looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and find
what was probed and found.

Try also selecting the correct model for your monitor in KDE or gnome.
 If it turns out automatic probing does not work and you cannot
manually select the monitor either, you would need to disable the
probing step ("UseEDID" "False" ) and enter your
monitor's
specifications and other options such as resolution in the xorg.conf
file.

Akemi