FatDog64-813, Nouveau and Nvidia drivers

[jakel]

Hi all, great to see a new release of FatDog64. Thanks to everyone involved.

I've tested FatDog-813 out and found that - while multi-monitor support is now enabled out of the box, cursor alignment is badly off. So it is in fact broken.

Is it correct to say that 'nouveau' was previously disabled?

While I appreciate there may be benefits by having it enabled, the user experience is not a good one as things are. My recommendation would be to to disable/blacklist it by default and have a FAQ entry regarding multimonitor support.

I compiled the latest Nvidia drivers and this resolved all issues. Driver link is below and having it available in SFS Manager would be a nice bonus for Nvidia users.

Download: nvidia-glx-520.56.06-k5.19.14-64

[ally]

mirrored in the fatdog 810 archive

apologies I was lazy, mirrored locations:

https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_Fatdog64_810

https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux ... river_Repo

[jamesbond]

Is it correct to say that 'nouveau' was previously disabled?

No, it was enabled by default.
'nouveau' has always been a hit-and-miss ... sometimes you have a good release, sometimes you get a bad release, you'll never know. But we usually enabled it by default. You can disabled it at boot time by passing blacklist=nouveau as the boot parameter.

While I appreciate there may be benefits by having it enabled, the user experience is not a good one as things are. My recommendation would be to to disable/blacklist it by default and have a FAQ entry regarding multimonitor support.

Thanks. What do you suggest that we put in that FAQ entry (I don't think anyone in the FD team have multi-monitor support, so I really don't know what to write or warn about).

I compiled the latest Nvidia drivers and this resolved all issues. Driver link is below and having it available in SFS Manager would be a nice bonus for Nvidia users.
Download: nvidia-glx-520.56.06-k5.19.14-64

Thank you for this, I appreciate it. We usually built nvidia drivers after a release, but we have been caught up with other stuff, so it's slow in coming ... so your drivers will definitely help those tho need it.

Thanks for @ally for archiving it too.

[jakel]

Is it correct to say that 'nouveau' was previously disabled?

No, it was enabled by default.
'nouveau' has always been a hit-and-miss ... sometimes you have a good release, sometimes you get a bad release, you'll never know. But we usually enabled it by default. You can disabled it at boot time by passing blacklist=nouveau as the boot parameter.

While I appreciate there may be benefits by having it enabled, the user experience is not a good one as things are. My recommendation would be to to disable/blacklist it by default and have a FAQ entry regarding multimonitor support.

Thanks. What do you suggest that we put in that FAQ entry (I don't think anyone in the FD team have multi-monitor support, so I really don't know what to write or warn about).

Regarding FAQ; I was thinking maybe a note about multi-monitor support that covered (for Nvidia users specifically) grabbing the latest driver, running the following commands, and restarting X. This bypasses the need to blacklist 'nouveau' and reboot for those testing out the distro without a savefile.

Code: Select all

depmod -a
modprobe nvidia

[jamesbond]

Regarding FAQ; I was thinking maybe a note about multi-monitor support that covered (for Nvidia users specifically) grabbing the latest driver, running the following commands, and restarting X. This bypasses the need to blacklist 'nouveau' and reboot for those testing out the distro without a savefile.

Code: Select all

depmod -a
modprobe nvidia

Hmmm ... "modprobe nvidia" would definitely only work if you have installed nvidia driver (either by manually compiling it, or loading an SFS); and it would also not work if nouveau is already loaded, so we still need the blacklist.

Or are you proposing to blacklist nouveau by default? If that's the case we'll need to test first to make sure that Fatdog can still boots up on those machines (and display respectable resolution) if we disable it - we don't want to make the first-boot experience worse for single-monitor machines.

With that in mind, would you mind writing a complete FAQ entry for this, either in HTML format, or markdown format (or any other format you prefer that allows us to differentiate semantic components of the document (e.g. bold/italic/code ... red colour, etc)). You can take any of the existing FAQ entry as examples. A step-by-step example would be good.

Thanks.