Latest Versions Nvidia Settings Config Tool Broken

[garystewart]

There have been many complaints posted regarding nvidia settings not sticking on reboot. Usually this is a matter of permissions and paths, but my observation, at least for my system, is that the latest versions of the Config Tool are broken. I've found that the brightness, contrast and gamma settings cannot be saved to the nvidia-settings.rc file using the latest tools. Even if one manually provides the settings, at some point the file will be overwritten and erase the entries for these 3 important parameters. The file also seems always to revert back or be overwritten on reboot, even when the file is manually fixed before booting, so that you end up going nowhere. It is no big deal if you don't need accurate color, but since I do graphics extensively, it renders most of the latest distro releases like mint 14.1 useless to me. I'm now looking for a distro that can still use legacy nvidia drivers. The 173 drivers work superbly for my old 7900gs.

If anyone has been able to find or write a fix for this problem, please let me know.

Thanks for your responses,

garystewart

[GeneC]

Gary

Forgive me if you have tried this, but I must ask a basic question.
Did you try saving these settings as 'root'?

Code: Select all

sudo nvidia-settings

[garystewart]

Yes, that's the first thing I did. As I said, on this system it appears unrelated to permissions. The settings for brightness, contrast and gamma are not being saved. Looks like some omission in the code, or it simply can't save these settings for my legacy card, although technically the 6 and 7 series cards are not legacy and included for the current driver. So it simply does not work for my card and that's a definite. Other settings are correctly saved and I can observe the changes in the file. But those 3 are not included.

Any other ideas?

[zerozero]

exactly which driver are you using for that 7xxx card? you know that the 304.x driver is the last to support the 6/7 nvidia cards?
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=112403

[garystewart]

Interesting you asked. I used the nvidia-current driver. However early this morning, I uninstalled and tried the 304 experimental. Same problem with not saving the brightess, contrast and gamma settings. When I rebooted the machine later this morning, my OS was pretty much tanked, with mouse freezes, panel disappearing, unable to move frozen windows, all signs of a video problem. Fortunately I have a second drive in this machine with Zorin 5.2 (ubuntu 11.04) which works flawlessly, so I booted into that and that's how I'm typing this. No video or any problems BTW, same machine, same hardware. I might as well add that I had a really tough time installing Mint. First time I tried the 64 bit Mate version things ran very slow. Tried again with the Cinnamon 64 bit version, but my drive would not take the ext4 formatting, so after 3 or 4 attempts I used Reiser and it installed. I later read there are some serious problems with ext4 format in Ubuntu 12.10 which is still the foundation for Mint which makes me wonder whether 14.1 can be truly stable until there are major fixes to 12.10.