Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The T61 uses this nvidia driver
This evening when I got home from work I decided apply the latest kernel update to all my CentOS 5 machines, including the trusty Lenovo Thinkpad T61 I was issued by my employer. The impetus was another in a series of Enterprise Watch List e-mails detailing the vulnerabilities cured by the last couple of updates.
The new kernel package I downloaded is:
kernel-2.6.18-128.4.1.el5.centos.plus.i686.rpm
The upgrades went smoothly, including the one for my home desktop that has an nvidia 6200TC card in it. Checking the nvidia web site, I found that the latest driver was released in July. So along with the kernel upgrade I decided to install the new driver. The specific package was:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run
After I’d upgraded all the other machines it was the Thinkpad’s turn. I installed the kernel with an “rpm -ivh” and then upgraded the related kernel packages (-headers, -devel and -doc) with an “rpm -Uvh”.
Rebooting to runlevel 3, I then installed the same video driver I’d used on the nvidia desktop. Another reboot and I had… FAIL. Just the blinking caps lock indicator and a black screen that hinted something was seriously hosed.
Going over the the nvidia support site I noted that in fact the graphics chipset on the laptop, the Quadro NVS 140M, actually didn’t have a current shipping production driver but only a beta driver released in 2007. After trying that driver all day, I decided to dig some more, and found this one (released Feb, 2009) worked as well or better:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-177.70.33-pkg1.run
Like the other drivers, this was installed while in runlevel 3.
Later on, after docking the laptop so I could use my external 17” LCD panel, I found that I was able to open up the VMware web console full screen — something that hadn’t worked with the previous version of the 185.18 driver I’d been using for the last couple of weeks (more on getting the T61 to work with a 4:3 external LCD in a post to come).