NVIDIA 7050 support

[Winddrift]

I stumbled upon this article:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=771&num=6

and find it curious, as now, 8 months later, over all support of the chipset seems lacking. I haven't tried Fedora, which was used on the test system. I have tried the following with poor results: SUSE 10.3, PCLINUXOS Gnome edition, Mepis 7.02 rc2,ans Ubuntu 7. The only successful install has been Sabayon Linux 3.5 Loop 2. My system uses a Biostar TForce 7050 MB, Athlon X2 64 3800, 2gb PC800 RAM, Segate 80gb IDE boot drive. I use the onboard gpu. Problems are mainly with the gpu, but also boot errors, and failure to boot. I'm just begining to test Sabayon, but so afr it's very nice.

My question is to Phoronix. Shouldn't you test with more than one ditrobution? Your article would lead one to believe that it should work fine for anyone, when my testing, at this late date, show that not to be the case.

[deanjo]

Having worked with quite a few MB's with the 7050 chipset I'm surprised you are having issues with it. I would suspect less the chipset then perhaps the BIOS on the motherboard or just a bad board in general (Especially Biostar which has a less then stellar track record and BIOS's). You weren't to specific in on the issues but having used these chipsets on Opensuse 10.3 and Bluewhite work quite well.

[Winddrift]

I've had this board since June of '07 running XP Pro without a glitch. And though everyone has different experiences with different hardware, Biostar has been extremely reliable for me. I ran my own shop up to a short time ago, and sucessfully built maybe, 500 pcs with only 1 MV failure! This is, though, the only one I've built on the 7050 chipset. I have the newest bios. My main problem is graphics driver failure. X starts to load, the system blinks, them I'm at the console. No error message. Manually starting X fails also. Yet, as I say, Sabayon loads ( using the NVIDIA driver) and runs perecftly. Even the HD Audio works.
SUSE failed to load the video driver during the install. I would also get a Grub error 18, yet none of the distros had this issue. Mepis would just freeze in the middle of the install, but then, I've never had a successful install of Mepis on any of the machines, including a Dell PIII based machine I've tried it on. I did get PCLINUXOS to laod the VESA driver and boot to a desktop, then work ok, so it appears to be NVIDIA's driver that may be the issue. Any ideas?

Having worked with quite a few MB's with the 7050 chipset I'm surprised you are having issues with it. I would suspect less the chipset then perhaps the BIOS on the motherboard or just a bad board in general (Especially Biostar which has a less then stellar track record and BIOS's). You weren't to specific in on the issues but having used these chipsets on Opensuse 10.3 and Bluewhite work quite well.

[deanjo]

I've had this board since June of '07 running XP Pro without a glitch. And though everyone has different experiences with different hardware, Biostar has been extremely reliable for me. I ran my own shop up to a short time ago, and sucessfully built maybe, 500 pcs with only 1 MV failure! This is, though, the only one I've built on the 7050 chipset. I have the newest bios. My main problem is graphics driver failure. X starts to load, the system blinks, them I'm at the console. No error message. Manually starting X fails also. Yet, as I say, Sabayon loads ( using the NVIDIA driver) and runs perecftly. Even the HD Audio works.
SUSE failed to load the video driver during the install. I would also get a Grub error 18, yet none of the distros had this issue. Mepis would just freeze in the middle of the install, but then, I've never had a successful install of Mepis on any of the machines, including a Dell PIII based machine I've tried it on. I did get PCLINUXOS to laod the VESA driver and boot to a desktop, then work ok, so it appears to be NVIDIA's driver that may be the issue. Any ideas?

The GRUB -18 error can't be attributed to the 7050 nor the nvidia drivers. That error generally appears when the wrong drive geometry is parsed from the bios by grub (due to a buggy INT13 implementation in the bios). There are many ways around this. A quick google will show you workarounds

As far as opening on openSUSE goes, the easiest way to get things going smoothly without having to worry about xorg.conf config and such simply add Nvidia's opensuse repository upon install where it asks if you would like to add additional repos. I would also recommend adding the suse updates repo in there as well.

[Kano]

Best is to look deeply at

fdisk -l

and if the number of cylinders is smaller than the end of the last partition then you have a problem - most of the time caused when you put a hd which was partitioned in a system with ami bios in another box with award/phoenix bios. Due to a bug the cylinders reported there are 1 less than with ami bios. You can use a hd partitioned with award bios in a box with ami bios with ease but not the other way around. Sometimes even the Linux driver removes 1 cylinder - libata drivers can cause this too in rare cases.

[Winddrift]

Thank you

I thank you both. I've looked previously into the issue of this bios error, and though it still may be an issue, I'm curious as to why it only happens with SUSE 10.3. Looks like it may be that driver. And I'll take a closer look at fdisk. And though I'm repeating myself, Sabayon is working flawlessly. In fact, I think I may like it better than the Ubuntu 7.10 that's been running on my laptop for the last 9 months. If you like to test other distros, this one's worth a look.

Best is to look deeply at

fdisk -l

and if the number of cylinders is smaller than the end of the last partition then you have a problem - most of the time caused when you put a hd which was partitioned in a system with ami bios in another box with award/phoenix bios. Due to a bug the cylinders reported there are 1 less than with ami bios. You can use a hd partitioned with award bios in a box with ami bios with ease but not the other way around. Sometimes even the Linux driver removes 1 cylinder - libata drivers can cause this too in rare cases.