Yesterday I went through the harrowing process of trying to get Hail
going on a brand-new Athlon system for a friend.
The main issue was that he has a Geforce 2 DDR (ASUS AGP7700), lucky
bastard, but the Geforce DDR/SDR drivers in XFree 3.3 don't work with
it.
nVIDIA have released comprehensive drivers for Linux, however, they
require XFree 4.01. There are two parts to these drivers: a GLX
module and a kernel module. The kernel module does hardware
addressing, from what I understand, and does so in an optimized way
that's not possible through a GLX mod. In any case. The task at hand
was to upgrade hail to XFree 4.01, compile both modules, and make it
work.
Installation of XFree went fairly smoothly, overwriting the
hail-installed XFree directories. At the end, running
XFree86 --configure
failed, even though it said it knew about the video card. This was
because it was Geforce 2. Running xf86config worked, and we selected
the Nvidia driver (nv). This, again, doesn't work with the GF2.
We downloaded the driver files from nVidia, and unpacked them. The
GLX module compilation worked fine, and it added itself to
/usr/lib/X11...whatever. We then edited /etc/XF86Config and replaced
Driver (nv) with Driver (nvidia). nvidia was the name of the
newly-compiled GLX module.
Last step was to compile the kernel module. This is where the errors
come in. The kernel that is installed by default is 2.2.16-storm-ide,
unless we did a bad in the installation. I installed the kernel
sources for storm-ide, unpacked them into /usr/src/ and linked
/usr/src/linux to them, because the NVIDIA kernel module requires them
to compile.
Trying to do this, however, gave an error - could not find
'include/linux/modversions.h' or something to that effect. Looking in
/usr/src/linux/include/linux/ showed that that file wasn't there. I
went back and installed the kernel headers. This by default places
them in /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.2.16-storm or something like
that. I found modversions.h under the header directory
(include/linux). What to do. I went back to the kernel sources
directory, renamed 'include' to 'include-backup', then linked the
headers' include directory to 'include'. This meant that
modversions.h existed under /usr/src/linux/include/linux. This was
good. I compiled and installed the kernel module, ran startx, it
worked, hallelujah.
Actually, it wasn't that easy. The difference in files between
kernel-source and kernel-headers puzzles me. I thought that the
source package should include the headers as well. That a file would
be in the headers package but not the kernel source seems strange.
Secondly, what's the difference between kernel-source-storm and
kernel-source-storm-ide? When I compiled a kernel
with the IDE sources, depmod kept spewing out unresolved symbol
errors. This was perhaps due to the kernel-headers cludge described
above. But in any case, it took 3 or 4 kernel recompiles to get a
kernel that 1)loaded modules correctly and 2)allowed the nVIDIA driver
to compile.
We spent something like 10 hours on this. I've never been happier to
see twm run. Horrible.
Has anyone else done a Geforce2 install with Storm? Was it as much
work as this?
cheers,
Tudor
-----
tudor
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