[mythtv-users] Help with Mythdora 4 & nvidia drivers

[Scott Minneman]

On 10/28/07, Justin The Cynical <cynical at penguinness.org> wrote:
> Peter Caylor wrote:
> > I am having trouble getting Mythdora and the nvidia drivers to work with my
> > FX5200 card.  The system works with the generic "nv" drivers, but after
> > installing any version of the nvidia proprietary drivers the system hangs at
> > a blank screen during the boot process (right after Starting udev, or about
> > where the graphic boot process should start.)
>
> *snip*
>
> > Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  At this point, I'm not even
> > sure what log files I should be looking in for errors.
>
>
> I would look at the end of /var/log/Xorg.0.log
>
> This is my semi-educated guess, let me know how close I am to reality ;-):
>
> The screen you have been using is attached to the Myth machine via a
> digital connection (DVI)
>
> When you switched to the nvidia blob, the settings in your xorg.conf
> have something in them that causes the nvidia driver to bomb out
>
> When this happens, you run into a bug in the nvidia driver set (I know
> of this one as I have it with one of my Linux systems).
>
> There is something in the nvidia driver since about version 96xx that
> 'nukes' the display when using digital connections, causing a black
> screen on text-only terminals (text frame buffer is included in this).
>
> What I would do is boot into runlevel 3 (text only), single user, or ssh
> into the machine to look at the log.  You can also try running startx
> from a ssh session and see what output is returned.
>
>  From there, you should be able to do the editing needed to get it running.


I saw the same problem recently after I switched from analog to DVI
output, but don't know exactly what caused it.  The xorg log ended
with "no screens found" or something to that effect.  No amount of
working with xorg.conf would get it to work, even a pure generic
xorg.conf would bomb out.  I ended up reinstalling MythDora from the
DVD, running 'yum update', and now it works perfectly from DVI.

This was a FE only system, so reinstalling was pretty painless for me.
 Not sure if your setup is the same.