Help installing Nvidia Drives please!

This PPA has the 304 drivers you need.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

This page will tell you how to install it.

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Wow, i didn’t know that Geforce 6800 series cards were still being used. I take it this has to be installed separate to what the Kernel has as drivers for cards. I’m guessing the kernel doesn’t have any older drivers than say the GTX 400 series cards. for nvidia?

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Ok did all that, it’s trying to install… but won’t because of xorg… I have to downgrade xorg first. here is the error message i get when in install the nvidia-304 drivers:

"Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nvidia-304 : Depends: xorg-video-abi-11 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-12 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-13 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-14 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-15 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-18 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-19 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-20 but it is not installable or
xorg-video-abi-23
Depends: xserver-xorg-core but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
"

how do i downgrade xorg? I’ve managed to find some old xorg drivers and downloaded them to my download folder.

This is where it becomes difficult. The reason why your attempt at downgrading xorg failed is because you don’t have Utopic Unicorn in your sources.lst. If you notice, the packages had -utopic in the file name. The problem is, that repository is no longer being maintained.

Running such old hardware is making things harder than it normally would be and with your choice of distro, which only maintains recent packages. I haven’t looked yet, but I would guess that Debian may still support your hardware.

But since we are just testing things, lets see if we can get things working anyway. What are the xorg packages you downloaded?

Oh, and next time you get a black screen, try hitting crtl-alt-backspace to try to kill the xserver, or crtl-alt (Function key F1, or F2 through F6) to enter command line.

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xorg-server-1.17.4-x86_64-1.txz
xorg-server-xvfb-1.17.4-x86_64-1.txz
xorg-server-xnest-1.17.4-x86_64-1.txz
xorg-server-xephyr-1.17.4-x86_64-1.txz

and the nvidia drivers:
nvidia-304xx-dkms-304.137-21.0-i686.pkg.tar.xz.sig
nvidia-304xx-dkms-304.137-21.0-i686.pkg.tar.xz

These are in the folder:
/home/pianopraze/Downloads

EDIT>>> It is not allowing me to reply to you all. It says I’ve reached my max limit of posts as a new user for the day wait until tomorrow :frowning:

I have not extracted the packages, they are as i listed above. If i extract them they will over write each other as they all have three folders:
.
install
user

Have you extracted the xorg files? Are they source files or pre-compiled binaries?

Also you have 64 bit xorg files and x86 nvidia drivers. The x86 nvidia drivers are not going to work on a 64 bit OS, if you are running 64 bit.

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Whoops. I think that was my fault. My bad. I pointed him to that download. I forgot about compatibility.

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EDIT>>> It is not allowing me to reply to you all. It says I’ve reached my max limit of posts as a new user for the day wait until tomorrow

Why limit newbies in their own help topic, if they’re trying to get help? This seems stupid to me. Ok, limit them everywhere else, but limiting them in their own help topic? What if they need immediate help? That seems kinda counter intuitive to me.

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But your not op. Lol.

Ohh. I see you just copied the text by OP. I was confused

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It’s the forum software that does it. I think it’s meant to limit spam bots.

@pianopraze extract each package to it’s own folder in your home directory and post the contents. I don’t want to tell you to copy anything over without seeing what’s in it.

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I know, but I feel for the guy.

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I didn’t see OPs edit. I was confused by what you were talking about

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yeah, sorry, it wasn’t letting me quote him for some reason.

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@Eden

Can we temporarily give op a higher trust level so he can reply?

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Done. @pianopraze you should be able to reply again.

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The xvfb extracts 3 folders; “.” “install” “user” when extracted “.” disapears even when i show invisible “install” has one file slak-desc. “user” has two folders “bin” and “man”. “bin” has “xvfb” with gears on it. man has a packet xvfb.1.gz

xnest has same folders changing as above except change “xvfb” to say “xnest”
xephy as above but named xephyr

1.17 has different folders: “.” “etc” “install” “user” “var”
. is empty
etc has “x11” folder which has “xorg.conf.d”
install has “doinst.sh” and “slack-desc”
user has “bin, doc, include, lib64, libexec, man, share” folders each of those has way to many things to list.

Thank you Eden :slight_smile:

That is Arch Linux command - Pacman wrapper and AUR helper

Github link to dkms is AUR mirror - 3 years old

Link to dkms is Archlinux32 archive - 6 months old

Dynamic Kernels Module System is not a driver

Archlinux32 is not Arch Linux

@Diffident got right idea of adding correct ubuntu repository

Suggest OP delete downloaded Arch files and install repository drivers

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they provided this for the nvidia drivers but they won’t install until i downgrade the xorg files.

where do i find the repositary drivers for xorg???

I need 1.19 or earlier: ““For GeForce 6/7 series cards [NV4x and NV6x], install the nvidia-304xx-dkmsAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] package. Last supported Xorg version is 1.19””

not familiar with current Ubuntu

I assume synaptic can work same as on Debian to view older packages and dependencies, and if necessary force install an older version.

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This tells me these files are meant for Slackware. But may still work if we don’t find a better way. But according to distrowatch, elementary OS 0.4.1 loki uses xorg-server 1.18.4, which is the stable version available from:

This seems like the best solution, unless you want to continue the hard way, which is fine by me…I like breaking stuff. :sunglasses:

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