[Nottingham] Strange random reboot problem with Mandriva 2006: tentatively [SOLVED]

[Peter Aldred]

On 19/10/05, Martin Garton <martin at stupids.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 11:07 +0100, Peter Aldred wrote:
>
> > Well, I've disabled it, and it hasn't done any rebooting since. I'll
> > have to wait for some better drivers before I can see the pretty
>
> Out of interest, what card is it and what driver does it use?

It's an Nvidia Geforce FX 5200. The driver is the latest proprietary
one that installed out of the box with Mandriva 2006, also
downloadable from Nvidia's website, version 7676.

Performance is overall very good, Planet Penguin Racer (the new name
for TuxRacer) renders very nicely, as do the GL screensavers. I've
also enable the composite extension (lovely gui - windows in the
background become slightly translucent, when you move a window it
drops to 25% opacity so you can see what behind, everything fades in
and out :) ) and there's no slowdown in speed.

The only problem is this reboot thing, which is almost certainly a
buggy driver now I think about it - it also crashed once running
ppracer. The odd thing is, under Kubuntu 5.10 this problem didn't
happen (not that it's anything too big, but it would be nice to have
it working). Kubuntu was using a later version of KDE, so it may be a
bug in the older version of the screensaver; alternatively something
may be slightly broken in Madriva's packaging of the 7676 driver.
Kubuntu was using the same driver, but I had to install it manually
from www.nvidia.com.

If I have time, I may try installing the driver by hand, as it's
pretty simple, and see how it goes.

It may be useful to note that my dad's ATI Radeon (not sure what model
(9800?), I'm at work atm) worked out of the box with Mandy2006,
including fireworks. While AIUI Nvidia's linux support is generally
better, Mandriva may have cracked it this time, though we haven't done
much that used/tested the ATI card other than the screensaver and
glxgears.

Hope that helps - I'll post again if I make any headway with the manual install.
--
Pete