[plug] My new PC - a little disappointed...

[Blake Munro]

Hi all,

Well my tax refund came in and it's been about 4 and a half years since I
spent any money on my poor old desktop PC, so I headed down to my local PC
store and got all the parts I wanted to build myself a nice new machine. The
specs are:

Gigabyte M750SLI-DS4 mainboard (with Nvidia chipset)
AMD 64 AM2 dual core 6000+ (3000mhz)
4gb Corsair DDR2 1066mhz (these babies have their own heatsinks and fan
cooling system attached!
ASUS Nvidia 9600 GT 512mb DDR3 PCIe video card
36gb WD Raptor 10,000rpm (system boot)
2x 500gb WD 7200rpm (planned to set up in a RAID mirror)
Thermaltake Case with 430w PSU
ASUS Dual layer DVD writer
TP-Link USB Wireless G adapter (Ralink chipset)

So, I get home on Friday after a long day at work and spend a couple of
hours carefully building the box.

My nightmare started after a smooth installation of Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1,
32bit x86 edition.

Firstly, the mainboard has a Realtek ALC889A sound chip on board. The audio
was extremely distorted and crackly, thus rendering it as useless as an
ashtray on a motorbike. Ok, so this appears to be a known bug. Some may call
it a bug, others may call it "brand new hardware, give it time for us to
build in support! (see
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=3765). A mate of mine
had a surplus Creative Audigy 7.1 PCI laying around which he gave me, great
- audio problem solved!

Now, the biggest issue of all - and the only thing stopping me from being a
happy person right now is that for the life of me I can not get my Nvidia
9600 GT to work. After a fresh Ubuntu install, it uses the VESA driver and
gives me a good resolution, but I can not make use of any of the 3D features
due to driver problems.

Firstly, I tried the restricted drivers package by enabling the
nvidia-glx-new package from System > Administration > Hardware drivers.
After a reboot, I get a blank screen. Google confirms that Ubuntu is using
an older Nvidia driver and there is no support for my card.

Next step, I tried EnvyNG. Envy does not detect the card straight off the
bat and suggests that I may manually force the install at my own risk, just
to see if it works or not. Well, I can assure you that it does not work :(

Final step, and I thought I was seeing some light at the end of the tunnel
with this one, was to download the binary package from nvidia.com and
manually install the driver, get it to compile a module etc and all would be
sweet. Not so. The Nvidia package says that my card is supported, others on
various forums I have googled have had some success with this method, but I
still keep running in to dead ends, like a lot of other people it seems. The
module compiles and installs, but same as step 1, when I reboot, I get a
blank screen and Gnome does not start.

This is all making me quite frustrated at the moment, i've spent about the
last 48 hours at home like a hermit with about 40 firefox tabs open at any
one time, reading forums from all around the globe trying to get this damn
graphics card to work.

So my question to fellow pluggers - does anyone have one of these cards, and
did you get it to work with the correct driver? If so, could you please give
me some advice?

I have since also found out that my mainboard only has fake raid, and have
not even attempted using dmraid or any of those tools to set that up, i'm
just taking it one step at a time.

It appears to have bitten me in the ass by going out and buying brand new
hardware. I tried to stick with good, popular brands but it appears that
Ubuntu is still a little bit behind in terms of bleeding edge hardware.

Any help would be very appreciated.

-- 
Regards,

Blake Munro
+61 8 6363 5680
blake.munro at gmail.com
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