Changing video card/GPU in MCE

[Craptastic]

For a host of reasons, mostly the time spent testing on the TV, I am migrating my installation from LCD to CRT. I now have to disable onboard GPU and replace with a 6200 with SVideo.

As a relative newbie to Linux, are there any obvious pitfalls to changing the nvidia driver and using the card versus the GPU?

Obvious windows reference here to not "uninstalling" old software and drivers.

Searched the wiki and the forum and could not seem to come up with search criteria that could find a reference.

Oh, and the newest 6200 driver is a higher rev than existing 8300 one that I have upgraded.

MoBo is the ASUS M3N78-EM if it matters.

Thanks.

[pigdog]

Hi Craptastic,

I'd just plug it in and not worry about drivers at the moment.

Wait to see if it comes up alright.

Cheers.

[colinjones]

They are both nVidia chipsets, so the driver is identical and will make the necessary changes automatically. However, you need to tell X to start using the alternate chipset. The quickest way of doing this is disable the onboard GPU in BIOS (it must be disabled, not merely changed in priority) if this is possible with your BIOS. Then reboot, and hold Shift down whilst the Kubuntu loader screen is progressing. This will throw you into the AV Wizard again which will choose the correct chipset. However, as you are connected using Svideo, you will need to use the keyboard shortcuts to select that output once the AV Wizard is running (keys 1 - 5, can't remember which is svideo, but make sure you wait at least 15 second between each attempt)

If your BIOS does not have the ability to disable the onboard, then you will need to ESC during the GRUB boot menu, and go to the recovery console. From there you can type:

lspci

Now identify the PCI BUS ID of the new chipset. Then edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and modify the PCI Bus ID parameter in the Device section to match..., save, reboot, and hold shift down again.

[Craptastic]

Thanks,

You read my mind. I was having a lot of issues, the plug and play part was just not working. I ended up doing a new install of LMCE off the new card. And yes, my BIOS only supports GPU order, not disabling.

I was having a lot of trouble out of the box so did the driver update to 180.51 and then started having a lot of issues with OpenGL so from other threads did the:

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-glx

It worked enough to boot but graphic quality was not so good. So I re-installed the nvidia-glx and I kept playing around with it and for a brief moment everything was fine. Until I played some more and screwed it all up. I had looked in my original xorg.conf right after the fresh install and saw the reference to Bus ID but didn't pay close enough attention. When xorg got overwritten I was right back where I started.

I was able to plug a monitor in with DVI-VGA and get back into the AV Wizard but the xorg file would constantly get overwritten. I manually added the Bus ID, which for anyone else will look like this, on the line following the driver in device section:

Bus ID   "PCI:1:7:0" - your numbers will be different based on values from lspci but it should be noted that lspci referenced 1:07.0 nomenclature while the data in xorg is separated by colons and there was no leading zero. Not sure how critical, but a technical difference.

Everything is now working great. I have full UI2 working again and I have absolutely zero tearing. I have ran the same video feeds I had previously used for the native 8300 on my M3N78 mobo and performance is actually better. My video card is the EVGA 6200. I will add it to the wiki.

Best $50 I have spent in a long time.

Thanks.