I've been running Linux at home for... 18 years now? Quite a lot. I know that early on, I used Red Hat, maybe there were a few other distributions I used in the early days as I was poking around. Slackware? There was a brief period where I was happy to run Red Hat Linux on a pair of SparcStation IPX machines, just because I could.
And then, there was Fedora Core, and then just Fedora, and most of the machines in this house now run some version of Fedora, though most of them aren't up to date.
I was on vacation a few weeks ago, and I had a netbook with me, running, of course, a version of Fedora. And, of course, I hadn't updated it in a while. Around 4am the day I was scheduled to leave, I decided it was a good time to start an update.
And the update was still going when I packed all my stuff into my rollerbag and my carryon messenger bag. (My favorite plane joke is about the flight attendant that kicked the vulture off the plane for having too many pieces of carrion.) But, in my last bits of sightseeing, I noticed that the upgrade had completed, and I had got to a login prompt, so I powered off, and returned home.
Delighted that the upgrade to F19 went smoothly, once I got home, I triggered an update on my development desktop and my fileserver/webserver machine. Neither of these went smoothly, and I decided it was time to migrate the important files off the fileserver, including the web content. I migrated all that content up to Amazon S3, and pointed the DNS records over to Amazon, and now I've got higher reliability and higher bandwidth. That's good. Getting files up to Amazon is a little bit of a different pipe than before, but in some ways it's easier.
For the desktop machine, I just installed a new hard drive and created a fresh installation of F19. That seems to have worked for the most part. I still have several directories that I need to recover from the old system, and then it'd be nice to be able to boot back into Windows now and then, which I've lost in the shuffle.
The most recent chapter of this particular saga was when I decided that I wanted to reinstall the NVidia display drivers. I've got two NVidia cards in this machine, both GeForce GTX 560 Ti, hooked to three monitors. I could conceivably do four, but I'm limited by desktop space and view angle.
I used Google to find instructions for "Fedora 19 NVidia drivers", and got some instructions that sort of helped, and the instructions had a final step that told me how to undo what I did, which I think is the best part. Also, a necessary part, because I needed to back it all out. The dead end I got to was to have the two monitors on the first card come up, sometimes as one big display, with the login prompt in the crack between the two of them, and the system "tray" stretched across both. Yeah, that's no good. Sometimes I was able to get it back where the login prompt was only on the primary (center) monitor, and the tray was only on the primary monitor, which is better, and sometimes I was able to drag windows over onto the right monitor (sometimes not, as I kept poking at /etc/X11/xorg.conf). One thing that I was having a real hard time doing was getting the left monitor, which was on the second card, to be part of the desktop. I'm sure there are technical terms here that I never have bothered to fix in my brain - I know that there are devices and screens and sessions, and these all have useful, specific, definitions within X. But X terminology has always been a little too specific for a casual user ("It's an X server, because it's serving X requests, like drawing things on the local screen. The client is the software running possibly remotely. Yes, you can run an X client on a remote server machine, talking to an X server running locally." and "It's not 'X Windows', it's a windowing system called 'X').
I went around the loop of booting, logging in as a normal user, launching the nvidia-settings panel, poking at stuff, issuing a telinit 3 and then telinit 5 command, and things not getting better. Now and then, I'd get a screen saying that something's gone wrong, that I should log out and try again. Frustratingly, I had not even logged in at this point. Also frustratingly, the mouse wasn't working, so the OK button seemed like a cruel taunt. I tried tabbing to the OK button, which also didn't have any noticeable effect, and then I realized I could just hit Enter, which made the screen blank, and froze the system.
I poked around inside /var/log, looking for a description of what had gone wrong, but I saw nothing.
Along the way, I went to NVidia's site, and downloaded their driver tools, which weren't exactly the same as the tools at the first website I stumbled across, above (hint: NVidia distributes nvidia-installer, which felt more comfortable to me), but still, at best I was getting two out of the three monitors working.
Whoops, sometimes I'd fall back to a single monitor, displaying at 1280x1024, which is stretchy and gross.
I considered that maybe hardware accelerated graphics weren't that important to me, and maybe I could uninstall and get back to the triple monitor setup I had before. Nope, that bridge seemed completely burned at this point.
I poked around inside /etc/X11/xorg.conf, trying to enable the connection between the device and the monitor at the configuration file level, but that way led to non-booting and backtracking.
I tried enabling Xinerama, but again, "something's gone wrong. Log out and reboot."
I looked up Xinerama on the web, and I was pretty sure I didn't want that, anyway.
I kept poking at stuff, finding web pages for people mirroring displays, and setting up multiple seats on a single system (woo, timesharing!), and finding an article about using four monitors and "Base Mosaic" - which had worked in previous driver versions, but was crippled in Linux to maintain parity with Windows drivers. I know that I had seen the "Base Mosaic" checkbox on the nvidia-settings control panel, but the popup help wasn't especially helpful:
"The Enable Base Mosaic checkbox enables Base Mosaic."
I'm sure it does. I'll bet there's some intern that had 4 hours left to get things checked in, and he had forgotten to make a tooltip for this item, and he couldn't come up with anything better. I would suggest, NVidia, that it's probably better to describe what "Base Mosaic" is, rather than the fact that a checkbox can be checked.
Also, it might be useful to have a name that conveys what your feature does. I'm familiar with how mosaics work; I've made mosaics, they're cool. I've used the Mosaic browser. I know that all my base are belong to someone who set us up the bomb, and I've made my time.
But, I've clicked on everything else at this point, and I've more or less been able to recover from the dead ends, so I set
Option "BaseMosaic" "on"
in the xorg.conf file for all the screens, expecting to get some sort of mirroring or something, but when I restarted, I actually had three monitors light up, and the login prompt was centered on the primary monitor.
Oh, but the left screen was on the right side of the desktop. Ok, that's probably not too bad, I'll just go into nvidia-settings and drag the screen over where it belongs. Done. Restart. Same thing.
Hm, maybe I didn't save. Again. Drag. Save. Restart. Same thing. Huh.
Based on one of the tips from an NVidia employee on one of the forum threads that I saw along the way, I tried using the Gnome-desktop settings / "Displays" control panel, and that had three displays available to position. I dragged those around, hit apply, and I'm done.
So, lessons learned:
- Install the official NVidia distribution - or maybe the other one, if it makes you happier. The other instructions involved akmods, which is arguably the smoother path.
- Enable "Base Mosaic", which doesn't seem to be documented, and may or may not show up in the nvidia-settings control panel. Good luck.
- Use the GNOME desktop settings "Display" control panel to arrange your displays, even though the nvidia-settings control panel also gives you a control that you think would do this.
I like NVidia, I do, and I get that supporting Linux isn't something they need to do. Also, I like Fedora, and I get that making upgrades between versions is hard. But this whole experience seems like it could have been a lot smoother every step of the way.
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