Those who know me will instantly tell you that I’m a nVidia fan in the whole nVidia vs ATI debacle. So big was my surprise this morning when I couldn’t get a nVidia Quadro NVS 440 working by simply going “apt-get install nvidia-glx” on that ubuntu box …
I tried various versions, and googled, and people seem to have various issues (most of which I never bumped into … generally I go emerge -av nvidia-drivers, update xorg.conf and then restart xdm). Anyway, as it turns out, the Quadro actually presents two PCI ids to the system, and the driver picked the wrong one by default, resulting in a black screen of gloom, simply adding a BusID line to the Device section fixed it. So you end up with this:
Section “Device”
Identified “something”
Driver “nvidia”
BusID “PCI:10:0:0”
EndSection
And after that it works like a charm… took me quite a while to figure out that the PCI:9:0:0 was not the one I need to be attaching to.