How To: If Your Nvidia Driver Won't Install (8.10)

There are a large number of PC's with Nvidia graphics cards and certain TV tuner/radio card combos that are affected by this bug. If you can't get your Restricted Nvidia driver installed in Ubuntu 8.10, and are greeted with the bulletproofx "Low Graphics Mode" at boot, then this might be a solution. To see if you are affected, open a terminal and run: ``` lsmod | grep cx18

cx18 96832 0 dvb_core 86272 1 cx18 videodev 41344 2 tuner,cx18 compat_ioctl32 9344 1 cx18 i2c_algo_bit 14340 1 cx18 cx2341x 21124 1 cx18 v4l2_common 19840 4 cs5345,tuner,cx18,cx2341x tveeprom 20228 1 cx18 i2c_core 31892 14 adm1021,mxl5005s,s5h1409,tuner_simple,tda9887,tda8290,cs5345,tuner,cx18,nvidia,i2c_algo_bit,v4l2_common,tveeprom,i2c_nforce2

1.) If you plan on using your tuner/radio card, then this is the solution: 

Reallocate the virtual memory so both the cx18 and nvidia modules will coexist. Open a terminal and run ```
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

vmalloc=256M

title        Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-10-generic
uuid        84456e0a-8648-477a-96ef-0116151ecc8c
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-10-generic root=UUID=84456e0a-8648-477a-96ef-0116151ecc8c ro quiet splash rootflags=data=writeback vmalloc=256M
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-10-generic
quiet

2.) If you do not plan on using your tuner/radio, or if you don't have one and the module is being loaded by mistake, then you can just blacklist the cx18 module so it won't load at boot time. Open a terminal and run ``` sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist cx18

Thanks for this post 67GTA. It finally fixed my Mythbuntu setup. My Hauppauge HVR-1600 was not playing well with my p5n7a-vm (GeForce 9300) and I was having no luck at all until now.

Cheers

I couldn't find a solution for this conflict so I opted for dual booting Ubuntu 8.04 (so I could use accelerated graphics) and Ubuntu 8.10 but this worked for me. Thanks.

Thanks for the tip

How did you get your Hauppauge HVR-1600 to run and be found my mythtv in ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10. I have the same card and the computer wont find the card in ubuntu 8.04 with mythtv

Shawn

dragonfixed said: How did you get your Hauppauge HVR-1600 to run and be found my mythtv in ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10. I have the same card and the computer wont find the card in ubuntu 8.04 with mythtv

Shawn

The cx18 module for the 1600 was not in the 8.04 kernel version. It first came with the 2.6.27 version in 8.10. For 8.04, you will have to install the module, and put some firmware files in the kernel directory to make it work. MythTV has an easy how to here with copy and paste commands: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_HVR-1600

Just my 2 cents, mplayer has been the easiest so far to watch TV with. For FM radio, you can use gnomeradio. There is a bug in the last two versions. You have to open gnomeradio, change /dev/radio to /dev/radio0. Then open a terminal and run ``` aplay -f dat < /dev/video24

67GTA, you are awesome. worked like a charm.

I'new to the command line interface is this correct place for the code vmalloc=256M. Wher can i get a copy of the commands and some examples.

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df ro quiet splash vmalloc=256M initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode) uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+ uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet

I'new to the command line interface is this correct place for the code vmalloc=256M. Wher can i get a copy of the commands and some examples.

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df ro quiet splash vmalloc=256M initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic quiet

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode) uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+ uuid 6e350bf4-1126-4330-9114-369714c919df kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet

Yes, that is correct. You can copy paste the commands from my howto plus see an example of mine in the first post of this thread.

Thank you.

WOW! This worked great for me (the 2nd option). I have an HP Media Center m8120n PC connected to a Samsung 226BW monitor and just could not get my nvidia 7350 LE card to work at all. I have no desire to watch TV via cable or antenna on my system so disabling the TV tuner card is just fine.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for this thread.

I just updated Ibex to the latest kernel and this bug popped up again when the installer wrote a generic entry on my menu.lst. This is the second time I have had to fix this problem. Does anyone know if this bug is fixed in Jackalope?

Son of William said: Thanks so much for this thread.

I just updated Ibex to the latest kernel and this bug popped up again when the installer wrote a generic entry on my menu.lst. This is the second time I have had to fix this problem. Does anyone know if this bug is fixed in Jackalope?

No, it's still affected. I reported it against the kernel, but was marked "won't fix" because the cx18 module comes from Hauppauge. It is actually still in beta right now. It has been reported to them also, so maybe it will get fixed in the next couple of kernel releases.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Your trick solved my problem.

Let my throw in another wrinkle: I didn't have this problem until I upgraded from 512MB to 1GB. If my experience keeps someone from getting the big headache I have, then I'll be happy.

Thank you!!!!!!!!

My mythbuntu box had been running flawlessly with a HVR-1600 and a 6800GT for a few months now, but yesterday the screen wouldn't wake, and upon reboot I was greeted with the evil low-graphics mode.

After pulling my hair out and trying literally every fix I could think of, this worked like a charm and has me up and running 185's. I completely agree with you, MythAaron.

You sir, have made my day and the next 3 days of hair pulling a lot easier.

No where have I read about this issue until I saw it here. I was instead just upgrading my box to use my new Hauppage card and kept hitting walls

I'll update the mythTV wiki with this info, but....Thank you. You made what was quickly becoming a harrowing experience into a 30s vi session.

NOTE: With both upgrades and fresh installs of 9.04, this issue is STILL PRESENT. If you install Mythbuntu and have an Hauppage card cx18, and also have a 7600Nvidia, you will get this issue.

I filed a bug report, but it was marked "WON'T FIX" because the cx18 module comes from Hauppauge. I have not found any way to give feedback about this to Hauppauge. At least they release drivers:)

Just wanted to follow up with that this managed to save my upgraded Mythbuntu (from 7.10 to 9.04) and a lot of headaches. Step one solved my fresh install issues right away, but I had mucked up the upgraded with attempting to install newer drivers.

If this solution doesn't immediately fix your install, uninstall any downloaded drivers and reinstall ONE nvidia driver. Check out the guide provided here from help.ubuntu

I was getting API mismatch errors when I ran sudo nvidia-xconfig -a.

For me, I had downloaded and installed 815. Once I uninstalled it using the package used to install, I reinstalled the 800 via apt-get and was able to run Nvidia-settings. I replaced my new Nvidia xorg.conf with a backup I had made prior to upgrading and my TV was receiving 1920x1080 once again!

I've updated the HVR-1600 MythTV entry with a partial republish w/ attribution of the first post and links pointing to this thread:Mythtv: Hauppauge_HVR-1600

Lessons learned:

1. When performing an upgrade to support new hardware and the upgrade works only to start having new failures, assume the new hardware had a hand. This would have cut down on the amount of searching I did.

1. Just when you get ready to swear off getting the hardware to work, you'll come across a thread like this.

1. A backup today is worth a week in the future:

 mkdir confs
//I like to know WHERE it came from...so I keep a file of that around.
sudo find / -name *.conf >> confLocs.txt
while read line
do
sudo cp $line ~/confs/
echo $line copied.
done < confLocs.txt

Anyone willing to update this vmalloc hack for fresh installs of 9.10 which don't use menu.lst (grub2)? I just reinstalled 9.04 to use this method. I think if I do a system upgrade, it'll keep grub1 and the hack will still work but I'm not sure that I want to try it. ;)

TenGees said: Anyone willing to update this vmalloc hack for fresh installs of 9.10 which don't use menu.lst (grub2)? I just reinstalled 9.04 to use this method. I think if I do a system upgrade, it'll keep grub1 and the hack will still work but I'm not sure that I want to try it. ;)

Ditto here. Using the open source driver until someone comes out with instructions on how to do it. I'm not certain how to get started--and really don't want to mess up what I have going.

Here's the answer to my question. If I'd only read more closely before posting. I'm posting here for anyone else that has the same question. I tried this--and it worked perfectly!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308935&highlight=vmalloc+grub2

(see post #6)

Like Christmas Scrooge, the nvidia binary driver VS. conexant cx18 conflict is still with us. (written 21 Dec 09) So after installing the nvidia drivers and doing nvidia-xconfig and you are still stuck at a max screen resolution of 800x600, this might help:

My mythbuntu is now 9.10 with myth .22.

lj@mythtv:~$ mythbackend --version

Please include all output in bug reports. MythTV Version : 22594 MythTV Branch : branches/release-0-22-fixes Network Protocol : 50 Library API : 0.22.20091023-1 QT Version : 4.5.2 lj@mythtv:~$ uname -a Linux mythtv 2.6.31-16-generic-pae #53-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 8 05:20:21 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Mythbuntu installs the xfce desktop manager by default, and again by default, the grub2 boot manager is installed. This means that the applicable grub file is located at /boot/grub/grub.cfg. However, you can't write to it because the file is read only! The reason this is read only is because Mythbuntu 9.10 and Karmic Koala 9.10 all use the newer grub2 boot manager. So, if my understanding is correct, the proper place to put the "vmalloc=256M" imperative suggested by 76GTA is in the file /etc/default/grub. Specifically the line ``` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash

can be changed to 

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vmalloc=256M

As far as I understand,  this should serve the same purpose as the original grub entry in the menu.lst suggested by 76GTA.
Larry

Editing Ubuntu 10.04's /etc/default/grub in the above way seems to do nothing for me, any ideas?

sorry, running sudo update-grub clears up the situation. Thanks for all the advice in this thread.

If you are missing the familiar menu.lst file, your installation probably uses the newer grub2 program. Here's how my grub2 reports itself (April 3, 2010):

lj@dell:~$ grub-setup --version
grub-setup (GRUB) 1.97~beta4

More info here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2

i couldnt wait for ubuntu 10.04 and the 195 driver so i installed beta 2

at first i couldnt even get Xorg to work so i had to use a tty(which WAS working) to apt-get update;apt-get upgrade which fixed the issue.

then i had the problem of low graphics which was an eye sore and since i use dual head i only have 1 working screen atm.

at one stage i have had working 18x drivers and 195 drivers working but on package updates this broke :(

help anyone?

Just for general info , I ran into this problem about a year ago , but I did not find this thread at the time .

I tried to install 32 bit Ibex , and always ended up in low graphics . So I went back to 64 bit which I never had a problem with . Again with Lucid I tried and failed 32 bit . Then I tried this thread , which worked but my tv card "cx18" was choppy , so I went back to 64 bit .

So , if you don't have a problem with 64 bit , it might work better for you , if you have hvr1600 tv card and want to use nvidia drivers . Boxee was my need for 32 bit but I don't run it on this computer anymore , so I use 64 bit on this computer with no problem

Big thank you to this thread! =D> Especially the first poster, 67GTA, and to ravalox for showing how to do it in grub2.

Just to detail out what I did, so that if someone else comes along with this problem they can fix it also:

I'm running 10.04, have a Sparkle 8400GS graphics card and a Hauppauge HVR-1600 tuner card.

What I did was:

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

(I use vim, you can use the editor of your choice. If you're totally new, pico might be a good choice.) And commented out the line that says:

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

And added the line right after that:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vmalloc=512M"

Then save the file. Then back at the command line you have to run

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and things should work.

Yay! You can't believe how long it took to isolate this problem for me. ](*,)8)

One question, for those of you who are better at this than me: Note that I put "vmalloc=512M" rather than the originally suggested "256M". I did this because my graphics card has 512MB of RAM built in to it. Is that the right way to think of it? It seems to be working, so I wanted to get people's thoughts on that.

I can't believe this still hasn't been fixed. I've moved to 64bit, and this bug is not present because of how the 64bit kernel addresses virtual memory. Your virtual memory is your swap partition in Linux. Windows uses a page file. Since your graphics card has it's own memory, the vmalloc size isn't as important. The only thing vmalloc is doing in your case is allocating some VM early in the boot process for your GFX card (even though it doesn't need it) because the cx18 and nvidia modules fight over VM and causes a kernel panic and keeps both modules from loading. Generally vmalloc does it's own thing after boot according to I/O and hardware needs, so the vmalloc=? command doesn't matter at that point.

Quadari said: Big thank you to this thread! =D>

Especially the first poster, 67GTA, and to ravalox for showing how to do it in grub2.

Just to detail out what I did, so that if someone else comes along with this problem they can fix it also:

I'm running 10.04, have a Sparkle 8400GS graphics card and a Hauppauge HVR-1600 tuner card.

What I did was:

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

(I use vim, you can use the editor of your choice. If you're totally new, pico might be a good choice.) And commented out the line that says:

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

And added the line right after that:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vmalloc=512M"

Then save the file. Then back at the command line you have to run

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and things should work.

Yay! You can't believe how long it took to isolate this problem for me. ](*,)8)

One question, for those of you who are better at this than me: Note that I put "vmalloc=512M" rather than the originally suggested "256M". I did this because my graphics card has 512MB of RAM built in to it. Is that the right way to think of it? It seems to be working, so I wanted to get people's thoughts on that.

I just picked up a Hauppauge HVR 1600 off of ebay and found that it would not allow my nvidia drivers to load properly. I am running Ubuntu 11.04 (natty narwhal) and an Nvidia 9500 GT graphics card utilizing the "nvidia-current" drivers from the ubuntu repositories. I did the following to fix the problem.=:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

I found the follwing line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and changed it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vmalloc=256M"

Then 'Control + x'. Then 'y'. Then enter to save the file.

Then enter:

sudo update-grub

Then reboot and everything worked for me.

-teet