edit ...Following posts describe how i fixed this problem. Im no expert.. but I guess the problem was caused by either, the card was not supported by the nvidia drivers shipped with F1, or KM installed the incorrect drivers because it didn't detect the card. even with the new drivers, the card is identified as "nvidia chipset unknown" .. i don't know enough to comment why that would be.. maybe kernel.. but anyway.. i have a working box again.

end edit

fathers day soon. i previously posted this in tier 1.

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16168

it was a gigabyte GA-7N400 mobo. i initially stuck in a gforce mx 440 video card which K5F1 picked up correctly.. and presumably installed the legacy drivers.

i wanted to give dad this as a fathers day present.. but the tv out quality to a CRT tv was cod ordinary. today i bought a leadtek winfast A7300GT TDH AGP card.

I stuck it in an attempted to reinstall R5F1. it didn't work.

I noticed during the bootup, that the card doesnt seem to be detected. it says NVIDIA unknown .. where it used to say NVIDIA gf mx 440 something something.

knoppmyth installs mythtv, however, after i get to "checking nvidia drivers" .. (which is the next line after starting mythtvbackend) .. the system stops. it doesnt completely crash. The numlock key works. But i'm unable to ctl alt F1 to a terminal window. There's basically nothing i can do except hard reboot.

im presuming its an issue with the nvidia drivers or the kernel. Either this card is not detected and not usable, or it would work if i could update the drivers?

sorry.. im not hugely linux. maybe you can suggest something i can try?

well... i tried some things. I took out the 7300 and put in the old mx 440 to get through the install. after km was up and going, i pulled out the mx 400 and put back in the 7300GT.

It did work i supose. But KM still doesn't identify the card at boot. But i can at least start the computer and mythtv seems to start ok. Surely it's not wise to change video cards after the install though unless i can modify whatever I need to.

So i'll need to do some modification.

KM would have installed the legacy drivers for my gf mx 440. So I'll need to remove them and install the correct drivers. There is a wiki topic that describes this so I'll give that a crack tonight.

I'd planned to use tv out. And previously I'd had success with the nvidia.tv.out.sample.something.something.

Will i still be able to use this? or was it built by KM on the basis that I have a MX 440 at the install?

Is there anything else that I'll need to change / modify?

thanks.

well.. that worked.

I installed KM via ausdragon2 script with the old GF mx440 card.

Then I followed the wiki post to update the nvidia drivers. After I'd dissabled the old nvidia drivers, and mv startx to startx.save, I shut down the computer, took out the old card and put in the GF7300GT. I switched the puter on, and downloaded and installed the updated nvidia drivers.

restarted x and all worked good.

The card is excellent. The tv out quality is much better than the mx440.

I bought the card because it has component out. But i haven't been able to get it to work. I think the hsinc and vsinc in xorg.conf are wrong, as the tv seems to roll. But I'm not sure... ill search and figure out what settings i need for the component connection.

ok .. so the major reason why the component out did not work was that the blue cable needs to be plugged into the blue hole.. not the green hole. it was dark.. blue and green look vaguely similar.. and im not a smart man.

i changed xorg.conf to "HD576i", change the tv out to "COMPONENT" and added a MetaMode "720x576"

worked a treat. component is a very good quality - even for SD.. it still looks good.