[NTLUG:Discuss] Video Help Needed

[Preston Hagar]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 10:21 AM, George Lass <george.lass at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I have a 4 year old Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop with a slightly broken nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GS video card. By slightly broken I mean that if I try to use the "standard" nVidia driver that comes with Ubuntu (10.04) it won't display anything.  However if I boot in failsafe mode (which uses the frame buffer driver for Xwindows) the display works OK.  There are 2 things that I can't do with the frame buffer driver that I would like to be able to do though:
>
> 1) change the screen resolution
> 2) use the vga output to a second monitor
>
>
> If anyone knows how to do this using the fb driver please let me know.  I have tried the obvious things like setting up multiple Screen/Monitor/Device sections and Display Modes in xorg.conf, but this doesn't seem to work.  The fb driver crashes the second time it is loaded, and even when only one Screen is defined, it complains that the all Modes but the probed virtual mode are invalid due to "test failed".
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> George
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

By "standard" do you mean truly "standard" like the one that is put in
by the installer, or the restricted NVIDIA binary?  In general, I have
found the "restricted" NVIDIA binary to work much better than any of
the reverse engineering replacements, especially with things like
dual-monitor support.  To get the restricted driver, Go to "Ubuntu
Software Center", Edit->Software Sources, and make sure "Proprietary
drivers for devices (restricted) is checked" , then just search for
nvidia.  You will find several listed (the version 185, 173, 96).  The
one that works best will depend on your card and you might need to try
each one, one by one, until you find the best one.  I actually ended
up not using any of those three and use the version 190.42 downloaded
from the NVIDIA site.  It is kind of a pain with the drivers, but when
you figure out the best one for your card, then you will be set from
then on.

Preston