Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Huckfin]

I have more or less established that the reason that I can only obtain a blank screen or a few white on black stripes from the video config screen is because of my new NVidia GeForce 8500 GT card.

How then can I install the new video drivers if I can not enter Puppy's main screen? Shall I junk my favorite little distribution or --???

Thanks,

[Zeppis]

I'd like to bump this question... i have a few free days to do some repartitioning of my hard drive and I've learned to trust Puppy and Gparted for this stuff. Was a nasty surprise when Puppy didn't work with my new 8800GTS. Is there perhaps a flavor of puppy with nvidia drivers preinstalled?

EDIT: By "new" I mean a G80-based 8800GTS with 640MB memory. I have no clue how to install petgets from commandline, nor where to find the proper driver.

[Zeppis]

wow, just wow... took me 3 hours to figure THIS out?

How I did NOT get it working (what I did in vain)

When you boot the live-CD, you get the Xorg video wizard. My display was 1280x1024, and that's what I tried to set, and it failed. I ended up using another computer to download and install (in Puppy)

NVIDIA-100.14.19-k2.6.21.7.pet

from http://download.tuxfamily.org/nop/

I then used the remaster tool to include this on a new live-CD I burned. Btw I'm using Puppy 4.00.

Put the new live-CD in the new PC with the 8800GTS. Started with pfix=nox,ram (no X server, run in RAM)

At the prompt I wrote "nvidia-xconfig", and it wrote me a xorg.conf file. Then I typed "xwin", and got a black screen again. Bah.

How I DID get it working

So, how did I get it working in the end? Simple. Choose 1024x768x16 resolution in the xorg wizard. Most displays support this no matter what their native resolution. Sure, your screen will look weird because of the wrong aspect ratio.
I'm not sure, but I don't think this fix actually needs the nVidia driver PET installed at all. Try it. If it doesn't work, see above what I did to remaster a live-CD with the nVidia driver installed.

After you have X, you can get the PETget package

NVIDIA-100.14.19-k2.6.21.7.pet
from http://download.tuxfamily.org/nop/

Install it. Restart X.

Open a console, type "nvidia-xconfig"
Then: Menu --> System --> NVIDIA X Server Settings

Set your resolution to whatever your monitor's resolution is. Then click "Save to X Configuration File".
Quit the NVIDIA program. Then: Menu --> Shutdown --> Restart X Server.

Should work. Worked for me, anyways.

Thanks go to all forum members discussing similar topics earlier, leading me to the location of the driver and stuff... hope this helps you, Huckfin, and others...

[Huckfin]

When I attempted to set my screen resolution with xorg, I was using 1024x768x16, which is the native resolution of my monitor.
It never occurred to me to try a lower resolution just to enter Puppy and then download and install the PETget package.

After reading your reply, I did just that - AND IT WORKED!

The reason that I couldn't figure this out for myself is explained by how easy it was for Tom Sawyer to con me into painting his fence.

Thanks again for your timely help.

Huckfin