Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I give up. Been beating this thing up for days. It is something I HAVE TO DO. I am in my middle 50's. This is not for fun and games. I need my second screen to work well enough. Not perfect. Just in color. That will be fine.
Can we just get Nouveau to be in color in my second screen please?
Nvidia is not gong to work with the Nvidia driver for my Geforce FX 5500 in color with the Bionic32 OS and its kernel version.
While booting, both screens are in color. The purple text and the green text. Looks great, but as soon as it loads kernel modules POW it goes black and white in second screen.
Vesa does not work. It still either forces Nouveau on you or if you blacklist Nouveau it can't work at all.
I HAVE to get this PC going and I HAVE to use Nouveau.
It almost works fine.

It seems like a POLARITY thing. Like I'm betting is I got my wire strippers out and cut the s-video cable and reversed the wires I'd get color, but I don't want to try that with my only cable, and besides that there should be a simple setting in xorg.conf I can set to change the phase of the polarity. Right?
I'm not going to be playing games. Not even freaking Duke Dukem atomic addition! LOL
I'm just setting this up to run television video old school to a VCR and out through old school coax wires to 3 TVs so each person in my home can watch out nightly television shows without having to buy a bunch of stuff.
Sure it'd be cool IF the Nvidia driver works with this kernel and I could use video overlay and the video would go full screen on second screenwhile I'm doing work on the same computer via screen #1, but it ain't gunna happen!!!!
I've tried til I'm green and purple in the face.
NOUVEAU is fine.
Please send me in the direction of all possible xorg.conf commands that will manipulate Nouveau.
Please!
Thanks guys. Over and out.

Jeff, could you tell us what is Nouveau? Is it a game?

Flash wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 2:19 am

Jeff, could you tell us what is Nouveau? Is it a game?

Jeff-X wrote: ↑Tue Jan 05, 2021 2:50 am

I give up. Been beating this thing up for days. It is something I HAVE TO DO. I am in my middle 50's. This is not for fun and games. I need my second screen to work well enough. Not perfect. Just in color. That will be fine.
Can we just get Nouveau to be in color in my second screen please?
Nvidia is not gong to work with the Nvidia driver for my Geforce FX 5500 in color with the Bionic32 OS and its kernel version.
While booting, both screens are in color. The purple text and the green text. Looks great, but as soon as it loads kernel modules POW it goes black and white in second screen.
Vesa does not work. It still either forces Nouveau on you or if you blacklist Nouveau it can't work at all.
I HAVE to get this PC going and I HAVE to use Nouveau.
It almost works fine.

It seems like a POLARITY thing. Like I'm betting is I got my wire strippers out and cut the s-video cable and reversed the wires I'd get color, but I don't want to try that with my only cable, and besides that there should be a simple setting in xorg.conf I can set to change the phase of the polarity. Right?
I'm not going to be playing games. Not even freaking Duke Dukem atomic addition! LOL
I'm just setting this up to run television video old school to a VCR and out through old school coax wires to 3 TVs so each person in my home can watch out nightly television shows without having to buy a bunch of stuff.
Sure it'd be cool IF the Nvidia driver works with this kernel and I could use video overlay and the video would go full screen on second screenwhile I'm doing work on the same computer via screen #1, but it ain't gunna happen!!!!
I've tried til I'm green and purple in the face.
NOUVEAU is fine.
Please send me in the direction of all possible xorg.conf commands that will manipulate Nouveau.
Please!
Thanks guys. Over and out.

I assume you have a s-video out port you want to connect to the VCR via s-video cable (and s-video port for the VCR). This should work, however if your output port is not the same as your VCR input port (or your video card can't do the necessary adaption) you will probably need a video converter to convert the video signal to the correct format. It may also be that your screen resolution is too high for your s-video output, if so lower it (test at 800x600 or even 640x480).

Hey thanks Amethyst, but I just found the solution to this. I'll post here as well.
**** PROBLEM SOLVED ****

At Puppy boot menu press the Tab key on your keyboard and add an additional space right after the word vmlinuz and type in the following:
nouveau.tv_norm=NTSC-M
Followed by another space and leaving the rest of the sequence intact.
Press the Enter key and Puppy will now boot up and your monitors and TVs will all operate as they should have in the first place.
e.g.
.linux vmlinuz nouveau.tv_norm=NTSC-M pmedia=cd initd=initd.gz

This will fix your Nvidia + Nouveau TV output rolling screens and black and white screens for older TVs, VCRs and older devices in general I suspect.
Why you ask? Well, NTSC is the video standard commonly used in North America and most of South America.
However PAL, which is the DEFAULT setting in Nouveau, is the video standard which is popular in most of Europe and Asia.
Nouveau is the French word for "New".
So the developers who chose PAL as the default in Nouveau I'm guessing speak French and live in France or another European country and all their TVs, even the old ones, are all PAL video standard.

So hey kids, lets's get this issue published somewhere so guys like me don't have to spend 4 days trying to figure out how to get their TV plugged into Nvidia hardware using the Nouveau driver, which is quite common in tons of Linux distributions mind you, TO FREAKING WORK RIGHT!

Publish this somewhere please guys.

Anyway, the parameter is "tv_norm" without the quotes.

In my example I used NTSC-M

Here is the list of choices you could use from https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/KernelM ... eters.html which lists all Nouveau kernel module parameters.

Default TV norm. Default is PAL. Valid values: PAL, PAL-M, PAL-N, PAL-Nc, NTSC-M, NTSC-J, hd480i, hd480p, hd576i, hd576p, hd720p, hd1080i.

I've tested both NTSC-M and NTSC-J and both render color and stop the rolling screen of the old television/VCR.

bigpup, I've seen you around for many years helping folks with Puppy and I'm sure your posts have helped me many times as well over the years. Thank you! I see you even researched which driver I needed to be using. Thank you and Mike and Barry K and everybody for making Linux fun to use!!! Me loves me Puppys, messes and all.

I told ya it would be some simple setting somewhere. It ALWAYS is!
It just took me longer to find it than usual this time.

The goal was to get color to my black and white second s-video Nvidia Geforce FX 5500. Problem SOLVED!

I'm done for now.
Hopefully this will help someone else who is still using old hardware and old TVs and VCRs and so on.

IF and when I do get the Nvidia driver to work too, I'll add it as a reply here. Oh yeah and bigpup remember the .run file wasn't being found in /mnt/home? I copied it to /root and it found it just fine.
So root root it is! Whatever. Let's post that to the instructions too then right? Just add in if it is not found place it in /root even though it's within the save file system.

So anyways thanks again and please post this somewhere not so cluttered and concise to the point please sir. Would ya?

Everybody use your heads. Think for yourself. This covid thing. Stay safe ok?

Bye for now

Jeff-X

Jeff, could you tell us what is Nouveau? Is it a game?
Chaos coordinator

LOL. Good one Flash. To whom it may concern Nouveau is an open source Nvidia driver made by some foreigners who set it as Pal video standard like they use in Europe and Asia, so it goes screwy on North and South American equipment, unless you bought it this morning.

But hey, Nouveau, sounds like a cool name for a game. What's it mean? It means "New" in French Flash. LOL

I live half in North America and half in Germany....and well aquainted with PAL and NTSC (in my biz we call it "Never The Same Color")
PAL and NTSC are different how they scan the horizontal and create colors. Look at an old NTSC TV, there are all kinds of knobs to tune screen colors and on a PAL TV they are not needed.

PAL has better resolution through more raster lines and faster refresh. The French use SECAM ("Sequential colour with memory") and I beleive that Japan also uses NTSC (American influence after WWII).