| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Desktop Effects

Page history last edited by Er Qi Yang 14 years, 9 months ago

Enabling Desktop Effect

Desktop effects are a great way to impress your friends. However, not all Fedora machine have the necessary drivers to the desktop effect by default.

 

The below steps will help guide you in installing the NVIDIA driver for your Fedora machine.

*Note: You must have the root password to perform the following steps.

 

1

Before you start proper, you need to know what is the graphic card that your machine is using. You can safely skip this step if you already know.

 

To find out the graphic card, we make use of a tool lshw.

 

To test if lshw is already installed in your machine, type lshw. If it is installed, you should see a long list of hardware that your machine is using.

 

To install it, login as root in terminal using the following command:

 

  su

 

Enter your root password. Enter the following command to install lshw.

 

  yum -y install lshw

 

2

To get the graphic card that you are using, run the lshw command as follow:

 

  lshw

 

Now, here comes the difficult part. You would have to search through the long list of hardware to find your graphic card model.

 

If you can find it, it would look something like this:

 

             *-display
                description: VGA compatible controller
                product: NV18GL [Quadro4 380 XGL]
                vendor: nVidia Corporation
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
                version: a2
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 66MHz

 

3

In this example, the hardware is a NVIDIA Quadro4 380 XGL. NVIDIA drivers for linux are easily available on their website. Download the file here.(*Note. The file in the link is for the specific hardware listed above. It is correct at time of posting[22nd May 2009]. Please verify you are getting the correct hardware driver before downloading.)

 

 

4

To install NVIDIA graphic card, you must first exit the XServer that is currently running. However, it is not possible to do so at the graphical user interface.

 

(### NOTE: You might want to print out this guide from this point on, or copy them somewhere. This part of the installation requires exiting the XServer, which means you will not be able to see them on the machine you are installing.)

 

To exit the XServer, press the F2 button (in Fedora10. Could be other button in other version.) while holding down the left alt+ctrl key simultaneously.

 

There, you will need to login as root user. Enter "root" as your login username. Then, enter your root password.

 

To shutdown the XServer, we need to get the machine down to run at level 3. By default, most linux machine runs at level 5. That's where your graphical desktop comes in.

 

  init 3

 

Once you are there, navigate to where you downloaded your driver. For me, it would be:

 

  cd /home/cl1user/Download

 

Execute the install script.

 

  sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.11-pkg1.run

 

Follow the on screen instruction. It's pretty straightforward.

 

5

Once your driver is installed, you need to get back to the user interface.

 

Re-initialise your machine so it runs at level 5.

 

  init 5

 

Get back your graphical user interface by pressing F1(or any other button that is applicable) while holding the left alt+ctrl key.

 

Then from the graphical user interface, go to

System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects

 

Click on the Enable Desktop Effects button.

 

*At the time of writing, after installing the driver, while I managed to install the driver, I encountered a bug that causes the titlebar of the applications to disappear.

This problem is described in this bug report. But I have not managed to find a fix for it. Appreciate if someone could find a fix for it. Thanks.

 

-Qiyang

 

  Recovery
 

Ok guys, just thought I might post this here. Last night, my NVIDIA Xserver apparently failed for some reason. As such, the graphical desktop failed to load up properly. It show something like "Screen not found" error.

 

So here's what you can actually do to recover it.

 

Just let your machine boot up as per normal. After the load sequence, you will notice that your machine will stop at a screen without any means of input/output.

 

Press alt+ctrl+F2 to enter the terminal interface. Login as root.

 

Similar to the above instruction for installation, execute init 3 command. Follow the instruction above to re-install your XServer.

 

After installation, go back to level 5 with init 5. Run the startx command to start your graphical desktop.

 

-Qiyang

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.