Steal config from Trident?

Help with graphics cards on GhostBSD.
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sporkman
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:22 pm

Steal config from Trident?

Post by sporkman »

I'm unclear on where Trident is going - I had tried GhostBSD and Trident on the same hardware (old i3, 16GB, old/cheap nvidia GeForce 9500) and Trident did a better job of giving me working/accelerated graphics. I liked both, but I was in a hurry so I just went with whatever happened to work - that's random, not saying one is better than the other!

I wonder if I might be able to copy some info over from Trident to make Ghost work properly, any ideas on what I should look at? I've been out of the desktop unix arena for like 15+ years now, I can't even find the X config file. :)

Anyhow, I have another drive in this host with GhostBSD installed, so I'm going to tinker while I wait on the Trident folks to figure out where they're going...
sporkman
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:22 pm

Re: Steal config from Trident?

Post by sporkman »

So I solved this myself...

Found my config in /usr/local/etc/X11 on the Trident install.

But the real issue is that Trident somehow found the right nvidia kernel module. "dmesg" showed me that the latest/stock nvidia module GhostBSD activates does not support the GeForce 9500. I manually used "pkg" to grab a legacy version and I now have what I think is full acceleration.

There's some tearing on youtube, not sure what that is, but the frame rate seems right and dragging windows around is much smoother.
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ericbsd
Developer
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Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:54 pm

Re: Steal config from Trident?

Post by ericbsd »

GeForce 9500 is not supported by the default driver on GhostBSD, you would need to install another Nvidia driver.
sporkman
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:22 pm

Re: Steal config from Trident?

Post by sporkman »

Interesting. I wonder what magic Trident was doing here? I mounted my old Trident disk, and poking through pkg's local sqlite file, they somehow picked the older nvidia package. Maybe something worth stealing for GhostBSD? I'll poke some more. They must be cycling through all the available nvidia packages and watching output when the kernel module is loaded to ascertain which package "works". I know the portion of the Trident install where X was being setup was REALLY SLOW.

Anyhow, this is what I have now that works:

nvidia-driver-340-340.107_3 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware OpenGL rendering
nvidia-settings-415.25 Display Control Panel for X NVidia driver
nvidia-xconfig-415.25 Tool to manipulate X configuration files for the NVidia driver

The nvidia panel works. The only issue I see is some tearing in video playback, but it seems like this might just be a FreeBSD thing based on some of the other posts I've seen.

My real question - will GhostBSD on future updates decide that the "wrong" nvidia package is installed and try to "fix" it for me?
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