Slackware and nVidia

My Video is: "nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2)"


Well my home server finally bit the dust in 2020, I replaced the power supply and forgot to re-connect the cooling fan on the CPU. Heat failure. It was quite old and ran faithfully for over 10 years with plenty of abuse (no UPS).

I bring this up because going forward, I will NEVER buy a system with a Nvidia Video Chip until Nvidia fully opens their drivers.


I tested nouveau a bit on my hardware using Slackware 14.2. It seems to be acceptable on 14.2, but these slackbuilds:

works better for me, so I stuck with the nVidia proprietary driver.


Note, the following applies to slackware versions 13.37 and 14.1. Nouveau with Version 14.0 seemed to work fine. Odd that nouveau seemed to backtrack a bit with 14.1.


Seems my hardware does not work very well with nouveau under slackware Version 14.1 or 13.37.

Under 14.1 X would crash, so with 14.1 I am using nVidia proprietary driver which works without any issues and I get to have full 3d support. I installed version 304.116, you can go to this nVidia Forum Entry to see the most current versions.

Please note, the nouveau issue is not a problem with slackware, nouveau is a package slackware supplies, with my hardware I would have the same issue no matter what distro I use. slackware does not automagically gets around the issue, which is why I stay with slackware.


With 13.37 I can use nouveau driver, but I had to turn of 3d, which was not a big deal. Based upon my hardware, I created file "/etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf" with this one line:

to prevent X from showing a mangled screen. That turns off 3d acceleration, I noticed celestia is much slower, but neverball seems to be fine. I really never use 3d applications and only played with celestia when I had the proprietary nVidia driver to see what '3d' was all about. I hear rumors 3d acceleration on nouveau works fine if you install the testing kernel (2.6.38.4) that comes with 13.37. I stuck with the stock kernel (2.6.37.6) because 3d does not do much for me (yet).

But much later, I ended up switching to the nVidia proprietary driver because my favorite vtwm theme has a very minor issue on screen redraw using nouveau. Changing to the proprietary driver corrected the issue. Took me quite a while to track down the issue, seems it is related to string "ButtonColorIsFrame" in my .vtwmrc, when on I would see flashing when quickly flipping to a different position in the panner when use F-keys.

Switching to the proprietary driver was trivial, just follow the instructions included in the download. So far, the driver works great.


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