nvidia 8400GS 64-bit driver install

[Anonymous]

I incautiously bought an EVGA 8400GS card because it only draws ~30W. But it's not recognised by Xorg.

Nvidia have a driver for many of their cards including this one (NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-304.51.tar.gz) but they seem not to have tested their (needlessly-complicated) makefile, since it breaks when run.

Before I do the work of debugging it, has someone else perhaps already done that?

 

[Uniballer]

I'm running nvidia-driver-304.64 on a 9.1 amd64 system with an 8400GS card. I built everything from ports.

 

[Anonymous]

So is it recognised by whatever version of Xorg that 9.1 loads? It certainly wasn't recognised by 8.3's

(edit) Wait...304.64? Two days ago I got 304.41 (iirc) and just noticed today that it's .51. What's going on?

 

[Uniballer]

I built the default x11/xorg-7.5.2 from the ports tree on the 9.1 amd64 systems. I made sure that the linux emulator was loaded before trying to build the x11/nvidia-driver port. I added the line

nvidia_load="YES"

to /boot/loader.conf, and configured Xorg to use the driver using the x11/nvidia-xconfig port.

I can't remember much about 8.3 on amd64. The only system I still have running 8-stable is on i386 and using nvidia-driver-304.43. Same deal for building and configuring as on 9.1, though.

The ports tree I updated with portsnap today still has x11/nvidia-driver at 304.64.

 

[Anonymous]

Gee, that's weird. Thanks for the information -- I'll have to re-do the install to see whether I can figure out what went wrong.

Nvidia's current rev of the driver (I just fetched a copy) is 310.19, revved last month. They have their driver support set up in such a strange way that googling for the driver gets an almost random page.

 

[SirDice]

Stick to using the port. If you want to use a newer driver simply change the version numbers in the Makefile and run make makesum.