|
|
|
Linux driver purgatory
Friday, September 3 2010
While doing other things that needed more attention of the constantly-interactive type, I continued work installing Debian on the new Atom/Ion motherboard intended to run the teevee room's media computer (its name had been Echidna but the replacement will be Coyote). As I already had the OS running on the new motherboard, most of this time was taken up with copying over media files, installing software, and tracking down and installing the Nvidia Ion driver. Without that driver, the computer couldn't take advantage of the Ion's graphics processing architecture (or even produce a signal that could take advantage of the teevee room's 42 inch display). Unfortunately for the success of Linux in applications outside servers and embedded devices, it's still a grueling ordeal to do hardware-specific software tasks that have become relatively easy on Windows and Macintosh computers. (This is why it has been such a joy for the past few years to discover most fresh Linux installations correctly find and configure all the hardware they find.) While many manufacturers don't directly support Linux, Nvidia does provide Ion support, at least for Debian Linux. Though the Ion is too new for my Debian installation to properly install support, I was able to download the driver directly from Nvidia. At that point, though, things became a bit more complicated because I was doing things I'd never done before in Linux. The Nvidia installer was a text-only program and even after all these years I forget you're supposed to run text-only commands by typing ./commandname instead of just commandname (but why?). You also have to do this from the root account, and (most vexing of all) you have to do it while the X Server (the GUI graphics framework) is off. But how to turn that off? You find yourself editing the runlevel line /etc/inittab and then wondering why X Server keeps coming back up even after you killed it (another obscure Linux fact: CRTL-ALT-F10 drops you into a text-only command line mode). Oh, I see, you have to reboot the computer now. (I thought part of the reason people liked Linux was that you didn't have to reboot it for every little thing.) In the end I was able get the Nvidia driver working, though it still refused to drive the 42LG50 display at its full 1920 by 1080 pixels. But at least the geometry was right (1366 by 768).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100903 feedback
previous | next |
