Nouveau driver NVIDIA GeForce Go5200 corrupting on GNOME 3

Question

I am trying to get Arch running on my sister's laptop, since she was an idiot and didn't upgrade or update Fedora 14, which caused it to be unable to update at all.
I've had the worst time getting this thing running. But my final unsolvable problem is getting the graphics card to work in Gnome 3.
I installed the nouveau drivers as suggested before messing with nvidia drivers. The nouveau drivers have this severe problem: they don't draw GNOME 3 or GDM consistently. They draw GTK windows and apps fine, though.
Symptoms:
The text is garbled.
The top bar isn't drawn at all, or it's drawn with messed up icons and messed up text.
The animated water drop that shows when you move the cursor to the top left of the screen works fine.
So I installed the nvidia driver because this is simply unacceptable. followed all instructions by the book, then restarted. The desktop reverted to the "fallback" method, which was usable, but this indicated problems with the driver (supposed to be 3D accelerated).
Then I did "nvidia-xconfig", and rebooted. The kernel module now wouldn't work. The /var/log/kernel.log read near the bottom of it,
NVIDIA GeForce Go5200 GPU installed in this system is supported through the NVIDIA 173.14.xx Legacy drivers. The 285.05.05.09 NVIDIA driver will ignore this GPU.
Well that certainly isn't what I bargained for. It's nvidia's stupid driver. WORK already!
I'll include another log found at /var/log/Xorg.0.log because I think the DRI modules, whatever those are, may be responsible for this, even though I followed the directions and made sure the nvidia config didn't have any DRI anything:
loading extension XFree86-DRI
load module "dri2"
loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri2.so
load extension DRI2
loadModule: "nvidia"
loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so
Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module. Please check your system's kernel log for additional error messages.
Don't pay attention to the capitalization. It doesn't matter. The capitalization is correct in the files. I think the problem is to do with something else.
My guess is that somehow this laptop's graphics card is just so d--- old that nvidia forgot about it *sarcasm*. It doesn't explain why the nouvea drivers suck so much on it. Why are they corrupting gnome, and better yet, will it be fixed? Otherwise, this laptop has met its life-span.

Answer 1

I forgot something.
I uninstalled the nvidia driver afterward and reinstalled the nouveau driver, but I'm having new problems. I've tried to recall what all config files I changed to work with the nvidia driver, and I've reverted them. I could have missed some.
GDM will start, and I can log in but now Gnome 3 doesn't show any GUI controls. Only the background.
Xabre wrote:Well, as noted, you dont need nvidia driver (which is for geforce 6 and newer chips), but  nvidia-173 driver (gf 5 series),  which currently doesn't support xorg 1.11, which is in arch repoes.
Best suggestion, if nouveau doesn't fit,  is to rebuild or find a repo with xorg 1.10 (wiki might help), and the install nvidia-173 from AUR.
Isn't there a way to force the update server to give you an earlier version of a package? And if so, would it automatically uninstall the newer version, and its dependencies and its dependees, and replace them? I've been reading Man pages all day, so I'm really tired at this point and need a little help sorting through the information in my head.
Last edited by rj.AMDphreak (2011-11-21 06:16:24)