User:Aaronlow

LMCE version: alpha 2.22 Core: IBM eserver xSeries 306 (1U) 3.0 GHz P4 1 GB ram 500 GB and 1 TB hard drives (SATA)

MD: Gateway E4200, 40 GB SATA hard drive, 3.2 GHz P4, 512 MB ram, ASUS EN9400GT low profile video card, USB sound card connected to receiver through toslink

MISC: Samsung LCD TV, ONKYO Receiver, Gyration MCE remote (on order)

I recently installed LinuxMCE 7.10 in the following configuration: IBM 3.2 GHz 1U server as Core connected at eth0 to my existing home network, eth1 connected to a linksys wireless router with dhcp disabled a gateway e4300 3.0 GHz P4 HT machine with a low profile NVIDIA 9400GT connected to my recently purchased Samsung 1080p LCD television; sound is provided by a USB sound card connected to my AV receiver. In the BIOS (using the latest BIOS from Gateway), I disabled the onboard sound and changed the primary video card to PCIe.

I have been pulling out my hair for at least a month, trying to get the video to work with the proprietary NVIDIA linux drivers. I performed the following steps to get video working: note - I had some trouble getting the gateway to completely boot over PXE, I had to rebuild the initramfs with additional modules. I am not going to cover this as it is covered elsewhere in this forum (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC).

1) upon successful first boot, the AVwizard tried to come up, I pressed 3 during the black screen, after several beeps from the Media Director (MD), a low resolution screen came up. 2) I setup as much as I could with that low res setup; I chose to use the lowest quality UI. Sound, including DTS and AC3 worked correctly with no additional work. 3) I rebooted at this point, when the system came up (I don't remember if video worked correctly or not, it is not important for this guide) I brought up a local text login window Ctrl + Alt + F3 (I happened to use tty3, it doesn't matter, use F1 through F6 to activate other screens). I logged in using root with no password requested. 4) I typed the following commands:

   * telinit 1
   * wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/185.18.14/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.14-pkg1.run
   * sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.14-pkg1.run

I followed the on-screen instructions provided by the NVIDIA installer and let it overwrite the xorg.conf file (overwriting the xorg.conf file is meaningless as we will overwrite it again)

Continue typing the following commands

   * dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xorg-server
   * nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Use your favorite editor to change the graphics card driver from "nv" to "nvidia". I prefer nano. If nano is not installed, install it with the this command "apt-get install nano". Finally, edit the Xconfigure script to prevent LinuxMCE from modifying the xorg.conf file.

   * nano /usr/pluto/bin/Xconfigure.sh

Add "exit 0" to the 2nd line of the Xconfigure.sh script (don't use the quotes in the file"

finally reboot, using the command: reboot

This list is from memory, but I am fairly confident that this list should help you get more recent NVIDIA cards to work in LinuxMCE.

I hope this helps. I will try to edit this message with any other steps I can think of.