Symptoms:

After upgrading to R5F27, console fonts are difficult to read and the video has visible stairstep jaggies (like on diagonal lines). All text in the Mythtv menus in X is also affected to one extent or another.

Possibly not even show X with an int10 error.

Systems effected:

nvidia video hardware. Specific chipsets known to be affected: GeForce MX-440, NForce2 IGP MX4 (Chaintech 7NIF2 mobo), Nvidia 4000 series.

Solution:

roll back the nvidia drivers to R5F1.

Process:

init 1
pkill xinit

mount an old R5F1 image or hard drive to \media\tmp (to get to the R5F1 debs). See MountImage for how to use cloop.

cd /myth/tmp/nvidia/latest/
dpkg -i --force-conflicts --force-overwrite *.deb

If you get the following errors:

Errors were encountered while processing:
 nvidia-glx_1.0.8776-1_i386.deb
 nvidia-glx-dev 

Then run:

dpkg -P nvidia-kernel-2.6.18-chw-13
dpkg -P nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx
dpkg -i --force-conflicts --force-overwrite *.deb 

Alternatives:

Before attempting this you may want to try forcing the installation of the current or one of the legacy nvidia driver packages provided as part of R5F27. From current to oldest the appropriate commands are:

install-nvidia-debian.sh 1.0.9755 -force

install-nvidia-debian.sh 1.0.9631 -force

install-nvidia-debian.sh 1.0.8776 -force

(The 8776 version is the one you want, but it is no longer available on the nvidia web site so this fails - Cliff)

install-nvidia-debian.sh 1.0.7185 -force

Try this script:

I did a reinstall of R5F27 and found that the deb's found in /usr/src/debs/nvidia/1.0.8776 fix the problem. This directory exists on your hard drive after doing an R5F27 install, so there is no need to get the files from an R5F1 install.

Here is a script that I wrote from the commands I used to fix my system:

#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/src/debs/nvidia/1.0.8776
dpkg -P nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx
dpkg -P nvidia-kernel-legacy-96xx-2.6.18-chw-13
dpkg -i nvidia-kernel-2.6.18-chw-13_1.0.8776-1+2.6.18-chw-13-10.00.Custom_i386.deb
dpkg -i nvidia-glx_1.0.8776-1_i386.deb

Important: The final dpkg -i had some errors that it could not create the symbolic links because the files already existed, so I made the symlinks by hand, forcing it to overwrite (or rm the links and remake them pointing to the files that dpkg -i was trying to make them point to). I do not remember the exact commands. Sorry. - Cliff

7050/7025 GPUs

These new GPUs require drivers 100.14.11 or later.

For example:

install-nvidia-debian.sh 100.14.19 -force

Remember you need to BecomeRoot to run any of these commands!