[Solved] NVidia Drivers on an Acer Aspire 7520

Question

I'll keep it short and simple. I got this laptop, an Acer Aspire 7520.
Everything works. Except the graphics in Arch.
I've had to fall back on using nouveau instead of the nvidia driver - maybe it is or isn't better, but I can't get the nvidia one to work.
When installing Arch, when the time comes to test X, is fails with the error that it can't load the .ko module. Can be reproduced also by trying to run 'modprobe nvidia' as root.
Given that my attempts to try and put up with Vista just came to a stop with it's rather poor excuse for a network manager being incapable of getting an IP address from the DHCP server, I'd like to get this sorted.
Oh, almost forgot. The laptop is 64-bit capable - but with approx 2GB of RAM, even though it's a dual core, the benefits of running a 64-bit OS on it probably wouldn't show up. So it's a 32-bit Arch instead.
Besides, Arch64 is a pest when it comes to stuff not made for x86_64.
Anyway.
That's the problem. Is there a fix for this, which doesn't involve using a different driver?
Thanks,
Grem.
Last edited by Gremnon (2010-08-08 22:37:23)

Answer 1

This is what is currently in the 10-monitor.conf file:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nouveau"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900_60"
EndSubSection
EndSection
To change it to nvidia, I'm unfortunately at a loss for what to put in exactly.
'uname -r' returns:
2.6.24-ARCH
I use the stock kernel. I haven't felt adventurous enough to try making my own custom one yet, which is one of the reasons I went off Gentoo. They can claim it's easy all they like, my only attempt on Gentoo didn't work in the slightest.
Anyway.
Unless I'm looking in the wrong place, running 'tail /var/log/dmesg.log' both before and after modprobe shows absolutely no difference at all. Nothing is added to it in the slightest.