Nvidia GT 430 Install 2

Posted by JD 03/11/2011 at 22:00

I’ve been having issues with the X/Windows on the system that I’d like to use for a desktop. After trying different drivers and new drivers, I decided that the GeForce 7600 GS may not be up to the task. While getting a haircut, I looked across the street to see … Microcenter. It was loudly calling me to buy a new video card.

GPU Selection

I’d done some research and built a list of reasonable cards for consideration. $50 was my target price. Now I’m staring at a wall filled with nVidia and ATI cards. I really wanted a GT 440, but they didn’t have any in my price range. They did have hundreds of GT 430s – some in my price range and there was a $48 GeForce 9800 GT. This was ideal, but the GT 430 was intriguing. I needed to know more, so I asked the youngest guy there who looked like a nerd to help. He pulled up a GPU comparison website and was entering 9800/430. They were very comparable, the GT 430 was just a tad slower, but it used half the power and supported DirectX 11. Lots of thinking – ok, I’ll get it now and if the card appears to be crap when I perform my research at home, then I can return it. Research done. I’d gotten lucky with this card, especially for the $54AR price.

I don’t run MS-Windows, so the DirectX 11 support doesn’t matter to me, today, but it may in the future. nVidia has reasonable Linux support, which is why I’ve been buying their cards specifically since 1996.

Installation

The physical install was trivial, but the driver install … was more complex.

  • First reboot and I half expected the card to just work. I was running nvidia proprietary drivers before. The machine booted with the normal login display. Then my background was displayed on 1 monitor and thing else was ever displayed, nothing. No mouse, no icons, no panels. Clicking the mouse did nothing. The 2nd monitor was ignored by the driver completely. There’s more to be done here.
  • Ok, let’s try forcing a reinstall of the drivers from the distro repository. 
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall install nvidia-current nvidia-current-modaliases nvidia-settings
    and reboot since initrd was rebuilt. No joy.
  • Visit nvidia’s driver support site and some of the reading I’ve done becomes clearer. Seems the GT-430 GPUs require driver version 260.×.x or later and I was running 270.29-* from the Ubuntu repos. This could mean I’ve been using beta drivers. It is hard to tell, regardless, they don’t appear to be working properly. nVidia is distributing NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.44.run for x64 Linux. Install those with:
    sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.44.run
    The install completed, but things aren’t any better. Further, I appear to have miss-matched binaries, to I quickly decide the 270-* drivers from Ubuntu repos are best and uninstall the 260.19.44 drivers by adding the uninstall option.

Problems – Resolution Too Low

Then I walk over to the machine – I’ve been working from an ssh session – and type 

startx
There is an error displayed – no window manager found.
startx `which openbox`

solves that issue.

Back into nvidia-settings to try some more settings. I get monitor-A running at 1920×1200 (nice), but monitor-B will not go above 640×480 (it is a 1920×1080 monitor). Seems whatever method X11 uses to determine monitor capabilities isn’t working. It is 2 hours later and I’ve been trying everything I can think to solve the issue. I even manually forced the xorg.conf to the desired resolutions, but that just disabled monitor-B completely.

Solution
The final solution is to add a new Monitor1 stanza to the xorg.conf file. There already is a Monitor0 stanza, which I use as a template, then fix the HorizSync and VertRefresh settings for the new monitor. I suspect that adding the 

Option         "DPMS"
is really what made everything work. I restart X11 and jump back into the nvidia-settings program. This time the other monitor has lots and lots of resolution options – actually more than it can support, so I carefully select the mode I want and save it. I should add a modes entry to the Monitor1 settings to protect the monitor from me in the future.

Stability

It is too early to really say that it is more stable, but a few weeks will easily tell. With the heavy X/Windows use today, I’m proud to announce that no stability issues have reoccurred, but it has only been a few hours. That was the entire point of the new video card after all.

Faster

Compared to the GeForce 7600 GS, this GT 430 is faster, noticeably faster. No, I don’t have any data to prove it. I guess being fast AND more stable was the point.

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  1. JD 05/07/2011 at 09:15

    So I finally received the rebate check yesterday, need to deposit that.
    The card has been solid. X/Windows hasn’t crashed and the machine has been up … since the last new kernel was installed – just like it should be. BTW, this machine has been running 3 KVM virtual machine too. Rock solid just like you expect Linux to be.

  2. JD 11/04/2011 at 20:48

    Still rock solid.

    $ uptime 16:45:14 up 34 days, 8:25, 4 users, load average: 1.92, 2.30, 1.79

    It runs 3 VMs 24/7/365, including Windows7 Media Center AND this blog. I only reboot when there’s a kernel patch. The hostOS has not crashed since this article was published. I do not sit at that machine using X/Windows more than about 2 hours a week, so the stability really isn’t as much about X and nvidia drivers as it is me not touching anything very often.