[Ardour-Users] Can anyone help with a Linux problem ?

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Thu May 28 10:07:15 PDT 2009


On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 3:09 AM, John Emmas <johne53 at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> Strictly speaking, this isn't an Ardour problem but it was Ardour that
> necessitated the change so maybe someone can offer me advice on it.
>
> I've been running Ardour for about 2 years under 64studio.  Back in March I
> decided to upgrade from my previous stable version (Ardour 2.4) to Ardour
> 2.8.  Unfortunately, 2.8 was maxing out my processor when playing certain
> sessions so I had to revert to 2.4 until I could find an opportunity to look
> for a solution.
>
> The most obvious problem was that my graphics chip (Nvidia GeForce 440 Go)
> was using the open source "nv" driver which turned out not to have any
> hardware acceleration.  Fortunately, Synaptic would allow me to install the
> offical "nvidia" closed source driver which does (apparently) support
> hardware acceleration.  AFAICT, these are the required steps:-
>
> 1)  Upgrade my kernel to version 2.6.21-1-multimedia-486 (this specific
> version is required by the nvidia driver).
> 2)  Install a kernel module which is needed by the nvidia driver.
> 3)  Install the appropriate driver.
> 4)  Make a couple of minor changes to xorg.conf so that it uses the new
> driver.
>
> A few days ago I finally found an opportunity to install the new driver but
> to my horror, it seems to have prevented 64studio from booting up.  All
> I get is a plain white background instead of my desktop.  If I press
> CTRL+ALT+F1 this takes me back to a terminal which happens to be the
> 64studio login prompt.  So is it possible that for some reason I'm simply
> not being logged in any more?  If that was the case I'd expect X to launch
> with a login box displayed but in fact, I don't see anything at all - just a
> plain white screen.
>
> Can anyone offer any advice about tracking this problem down?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John

Discard all the hidden .Xauthority files in your user account and try again?

I'm sure you probably know this but the closed-source driver cannot be
shown to be rt-kernel safe because the source is hidden. I was having
similar problems in a machine here - upgrade to new xorg-server and
things that used to work didn't work anymore - but I attacked the
problem a different way and bought a $40 nvidia 6200 card from NewEgg
that works well with the open source driver. Everything was fine and
we got better performance than before.

Just a thought.

Good luck,
Mark



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