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#1 2009-10-19 15:22:35

Mzg
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From: Norway
Registered: 2009-09-06
Posts: 43

[SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

Title says it all, I guess. I want to have both the nVidia and ATI drivers installed, and ideally execute startx with a different config file depending on which driver I want to use. It would be nice to have the intel drivers as well.

3D acceleration is not necessary, really. Would be cool on the nVidia card, though.

From what I have read, this _seems_ possible, the only thing that is not possible is to have both the nvidia and ATI propiretary drivers at the same time. I am not sure if that would apply in this situation as they will not run at the same time.

Is this possible? Does anyone have more information? Can startx be ran with a different config file?

I am currently using a LiveUSB, thus the problem. Different machines have different cards, of course. Is it possible to have a "generic" nvidia/ATI config, by the way, or do I need to know everything about the card/monitor and have 1000 different xorg.conf-s, one for each card in existance...? :S

I am currently running the vesa driver, which works, but the resolution is very low. Also I could not get it to work with my desktop computer, for some reason. That's a different post, though.

Last edited by Mzg (2009-10-19 19:08:45)


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#2 2009-10-19 15:33:50

tomk
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From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

If you stay away from proprietary drivers, you should be able to run it with no xorg.conf - just let the autodetection do its job.

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#3 2009-10-19 15:34:51

Dheart
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From: Sofia, Bulgaria
Registered: 2006-10-26
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Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

You could try using two chroots for the drivers, but that'd require too much disk space, otherwise, I'm almost sure it'll work.


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#4 2009-10-19 15:39:56

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
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Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

Mzg wrote:

Is this possible? Does anyone have more information? Can startx be ran with a different config file?

As root, startx -- -config <config file> should do the trick.

Mzg wrote:

Is it possible to have a "generic" nvidia/ATI config, by the way, or do I need to know everything about the card/monitor and have 1000 different xorg.conf-s, one for each card in existance...?

Why do you need an xorg.conf at all?  Recent Xorg autodetection works great.  Just install every video driver known to man to your LiveUSB (pacman -S xorg-video-drivers), and delete your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

About the main question though: the nVidia driver replaces libgl, which means other graphics drivers won't be able to use it.  However, they will still work, just without 3d support.  This solution will give you 3D under nVidia but nothing else.

To get 3D under everything except nVidia, install the nouveau driver (xf86-video-nouveau, nouveau-drm) instead of nvidia and use the mesa libgl.

Last edited by tavianator (2009-10-19 15:40:12)

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#5 2009-10-19 15:51:30

Mzg
Member
From: Norway
Registered: 2009-09-06
Posts: 43

Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

Ok, now I'm impressed guys... That took you like.. 15-20 minutes? big_smile

So I'll just get every kind of open source driver there is, and get rid of xorg.conf. Simple, but your last statement, taviantor, confused me..

To get 3D under everything except nVidia, install the nouveau driver (xf86-video-nouveau, nouveau-drm) instead of nvidia and use the mesa libgl.

If I do what I stated above, will that only give me 2D?

EDIT: Oh, and shall I only get the open source drivers, or the propiretary ones too?

EDIT2: I see nouveau is not the same as nv, is it stable enough?

Last edited by Mzg (2009-10-19 16:01:52)


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#6 2009-10-19 18:52:02

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
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Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

Mzg wrote:

If I do what I stated above, will that only give me 2D?

You have two choices - either 3D only with nVidia, 3D with everything except nVidia.  To use the first choice, install nvidia and nvidia-utils in addition to all the other graphics drivers.  To use the second option, remove nvidia and replace nvidia-utils with libgl.

Mzg wrote:

EDIT: Oh, and shall I only get the open source drivers, or the propiretary ones too?

Just the open source ones should do the trick, and these are likely to work best with autodetection, and will give you KMS when supported.

Mzg wrote:

EDIT2: I see nouveau is not the same as nv, is it stable enough?

Nouveau was forked from nv.  It is very stable - I've been running the GIT DRM module and video driver for a while and have only seen two bugs, which are both fixed now.
That said, attempting to use the preliminary 3D support is about the most dangerous thing you can do, i.e. glxgears hard-locks my computer after about 10 seconds and not even the magic SysRq key can save it.

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#7 2009-10-19 19:08:20

Mzg
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From: Norway
Registered: 2009-09-06
Posts: 43

Re: [SOLVED] Installing BOTH nVidia and ATI drivers

IT WORKS! big_smile

Thank you all for your help! I now have xcommgr => window shadows and fading, urxvt with real transparency etc.. etc.. I could even play some games wink  From a USB stick..

It worked perfectly on my laptop (ATI Radeon card) as well as my desktop computer (nVidia card). Full resolution and all smile

I ended up installing all the open source drivers, nv instead of nouveau (I didn't see your post until now, taviantor). Works great. So I might uninstall nv and install the propiretary nvidia driver for 3D with nvidia? I might do that later..

Anyway, thank you all again wink


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