Driver information from terminal for NVIDIA6600gt

[jbander]

I'm trying to find out which drivers are being used for my Vidio card, I'm running ubuntu 10.10 and my card is a NVIDIA 6600gt.

[MikeTbob]

Try this command

sudo lspci -knn

You'll see a lot of output but if you browse it carefully, it should tell you which driver is in use.

[jbander]

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600 GT] [10de:00f1] (rev a2)
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nvidia-96, nouveau, nvidiafb


So it looks like I'm using Nouveau driver but I have three drivers loaded Nvidia 96, which I believe is the 96.43.19, nouveau (the one I think it's using) and Is the nvidia fb mean it is a nvidia fbcon and is that another driver or what?
The point is I've been trying to test all the nvidia 6600gt drivers I can find the 173 the 96 and I'm trying to put in 260.19.36 but I haven't been able to get it in yet.and I believe that the nouveau drivers was installed from Ubuntu 10.10 when I put the 6600gt card in the computer. With all those three drivers listed as kernel modules could or do I have a conflict. And the reason I'm doing this is, the drivers that I have now are freezing the system.

[Rubberman]

The nouveau driver still has problems, and will freeze the system from time to time, especially when running video applications. I do not recommend its use as yet - install the latest proprietary nVidia driver. System freezes will pretty much go away.

[coopstah13]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bi...erHowto/Nvidia

[Rubberman]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bi...erHowto/Nvidia

Good stuff, but a bit dated. Current driver is 260.19.36 (or at least it was last week).

[coopstah13]

yea the driver versions listed are outdated, but the steps still apply

[Rubberman]

yea the driver versions listed are outdated, but the steps still apply

Indeed! Good link for the basic steps to take. Just an up-to-date heads-up. RHEL 6 kernels prior to the latest (2.6.32-71.18.1) had the Nouveau driver built in (directly, not as a loadable module) so as a result you had to reconfigure and rebuild the kernel in order to use any other nVidia driver, either from the repositories or directly from nVidia... A real PITA that I had to work through for my new installation of SL6 (Scientific Linux 6 - RHEL clone), prior to the current kernel. At least they fixed that, though I still have the build a custom kernel configuration as I need support for some non-standard file systems...

[jbander]

Join Date: Dec 2010
Beans: 55

Nead to load drivers for vidio card
This is the problem I run" lspci -v" which checks all drivers on my system and more. It says kernel driver in use: nouveau
then under that it says kernel modules: nvidia recent,nvidia-96,nouveau,nvidiafb
So what it looks like I have 3-4 drivers for my video card loaded and one, nouveau, being used. I think they conflict with each other. I'm trying to add drivers other then nouveau, because the mouse freezes with nouveau. At this point I can't seem to get rid of nouveau, I go to terminal and type"sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau" and it says that it's not loaded so I can't dump it. "lspci-v" says nouveau is the driver being used and trying to dump it it says it isn't installed. ?????????confused. I want to dump nouveau, what should I do? I also go into Synaptic package manager and it isn't listed as being installed. All help exepted!
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[Rubberman]

Unfortunately, Nouveau supersedes all proprietary nVidia drivers. You need to remove that before you can install others. FWIW, I have found in some newer distributions that Nouveau is hard-wired into the kernel (not as a module) so you have to, in some cases, rebuild the kernel without it. I had to do that with Scientific Linux 6 (RHEL 6)... And yes, there are problems with nouveau - my GUI used to freeze with it from time to time.

So, try this (before rebuilding kernel):

1. Download most current nVidia driver from the nVidia web site for your distribution.
2. Remove ALL nVidia drivers from the OS.
3. Boot into recovery (single user mode).
4. Install proprietary nVidia driver.
5. Reboot into normal mode.

If there is a problem with #4 because Nouveau is built into the kernel, then you will have to download the kernel source, run "make menuconfig" removing the Nouveau driver cruft, rebuild and install the modified kernel, reboot into single user mode, goto #4...

A major PITA, I agree, and I think we need to whack some folks at Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat about this.