I’ve been very occupied doing OTEN/UT2004/TrueCombat on Linux the last few days, so I apologise for not updating this space!
I’ve temporarily given up on my NVIDIA Linux problem with everything segfaulting. I went and switched hard drives from my computer to the family computer and the segfaulting instantly stopped. I swapped the graphics card as well and it’s the same — flawless 3D acceleration.
Here’s what’s been happening since I last posted.
About a week ago I installed Debian 3.1 (Sarge) on my computer with the latest NVIDIA drivers (version 8762). Completely clean. Should be stable, right? Not so, I was about to reproduce segfaults within five minutes of installation. I simply typed glxgears, let it run for a few seconds, closed it, typed glxgears, and eventually I would get a segfault. As time progressed the segfaults would become more frequent and other programs besides glxgears would start segfaulting to the point where you are lucky if you can log out because the logout dialog might segfault.
I was fed up so a few days later I moved my hard drive and graphics card into the family computer (puddleglum) which had almost exact specs to mine. I again ran Debian and attempted exactly the aformentioned steps with glxgears and could get no segfaults.
Overjoyed, I moved the family hard drive to my computer as they only use Windows anyway and Windows runs fine on my computer. Well, not the family’s copy of Windows. As I booted my computer/family hard drive up, I got to GRUB and selected Windows. After about five seconds the computer rebooted. Dang.
It worked fine when I ran my copy of Windows on the family computer, so I don’t know what was so different. Anyway, we ended up doing a repair install of Windows XP which basically reinstalls your system files. It booted after that so then I needed to reinstall AVG, NVIDIA (GeForce and nForce) drivers and Office. After that, everything worked fine.
Back to my system now, I booted Windows quickly (even though the point of swapping hard drives was so I could run Linux I wanted to fix driver issues while I had the time on the weekend rather than mess around with it during the week when I’m actually supposed to be doing OTEN). I was greeted by a typical Windows screen of error messages. Luckily the system booted. I remote-desktop’ed in (relieved to find the network drivers worked out of the box) and closed them and clicked through the driver dialog boxes. It worked fine after that.
In hindsight, I wish I’d sysprepped both Windows systems before I swapped hard drives. It would have reduced a lot of pain. Speaking of pain, on both systems Ubuntu booted up fine (though I quickly disabled XGL and the like on my computer/family hard drive for fear of segfaults).
I’ve been doing a fair bit of compositing/XGL/general gaming the last few days as well as trying to fix up my Akismet in the guestbook. Did I mention I got a working implementation of Akismet in the guestbook? I’m really excited!
Off to bed now, next two days I’m attending “Playerlink” event done by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra down in Goulburn as a bassoonist so I’ll be getting up before 7am tomorrow.
