[CLUE-Tech] Very Slow X Start w/ Nvidia Binary

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How new is the nvidia driver? The latest one released this week has
bugs. Refer to Slashdot for more details.

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On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 16:31:41
-0700"Timothy C. Klein" <teece at silverklein.net> wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> I have an Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS (older) graphics card.  Most of the
> time, I run the open source 'nv' driver that comes with X and Debian.
> However, I do have a copy of Quake3 and a couple of other old games
> that once in a blue moon I want to play.
> 
> So, with the guilt one feels at running a 'tainted' kernel because of
> the insertion of the nvidia binary module, I usually run the open
> source one.
> 
> However, when I do choose to fire up the Nvidia driver, I have a
> *very* long wait from the time I type 'startx' to the time the X
> server starts up.  On the order of 3-5 minutes.  KDM won't start at
> all. During this time, the keyboard will not respond, and even pings
> and ssh attempts from remote machines time out.  By all measures, the
> box is completely dead for several minutes.  I used to just turn it
> off, but by accident learned that it will eventually start X if one
> waits it out.
> 
> I have been unable to find anything about this on Google.  I can't
> pinpoint exactly when it started doing this.  Both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels
> react this way.  This is the unstable branch of Debian.  There are no
> log files that seem to have any indication of what might be going on.
> 
> Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this?  Any ideas? 
>