Kodi Community Forum

I have a motherboard with onboard graphics (ATI X200) but I want to use a Nvidia GT250 PCIe card instead.
Live 10.1 installs to the HDD OK with just the onboard graphics but performance on HD content is lousy.
When I install the PCIe card then XBMC won't work.
The XBMC logo comes up but at the point that the main screen should appear the console appears instead and the console flashes blank for a second every 15 seconds or so.
I am guessing a bit that having 2 graphics adapters is causing this issue. Is there a way to force Linux to ignore the OB graphics?
Happy to post any logs that will help diagnose this.
MB is an Intel D101GGC, CPU is a P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM

Mike

Reboot the computer, go into your BIOS (Try F2, F10 or DEL) and disable the onboard video card. It should resolve your problems.

Philmatic Wrote:Reboot the computer, go into your BIOS (Try F2, F10 or DEL) and disable the onboard video card. It should resolve your problems.

Not necessarily, I had a similar issue with my Dell's Intel card being used instead of Nvidia. What you need to do is blacklist the ATI card by editing the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Search around the forums for details if you're not sure.

Thanks for the replies.
The BIOS doesn't have any option to disable the on board graphics. You can only select which has priority. (onboard, PCI or PCIE)
Linux is using the correct adapter to display the console but XBMC won't start when the PCIe card is installed regardless of which adapter I give priority.

The blacklist thing sounds like the ticket. I'll investigate and post back with results.
Thanks again,
Mike

My guess that it was a coflict with the onboard graphics was wrong. the lspci -vv-nn command shows what I thought was the on board graphics was in fact the host bridge.

I read thru the dmsg log file (/var/dmsg.log?) and found that the (Winfast) Nvidia GT520 card is just not supported by the nvidia driver that is installed with Live.
Apparently I need to install a newer driver.
Still working on that.

Well I got it working.
In the end all I needed to do was install the latest Nvidia driver.
I know the documentation for Live says "NVIDIA GeForce 6-Series and newer supported, GeForce 8-Series and newer recommended."
but it appears that's not quite true.
It appears that the "newest" Nvidia cards will not work unless you install drivers for them.

So for the benefit of anyone who is reading this thread trying to figure out why their XBMC install won't go I am going to spell out where the debug info is and how to get to it.

I am going to write this for newbies since that's where I came from.

I am going to assume that your install at least gets as far as a console or terminal screen. To get this you can try pressing CTRL-ALT-F1 or you can log into your xbmclive box from a windows PC using a program like puTTY.
The latter has the disadvantage that you need to know the ip address and the advantage that you can cut and paste code from here into the terminal.

So Where to look for error messages
Start by typing:
This will give you a list of the hardware in your PC and the drivers and kernel modul in use for them.

The next place to look for clues is the log files. These are located in "/var/log" directory. The ones that are likely to hold clues are Xorg.0.log and dmsg. You can view them in a text editor using the following command
sudo nano /var/log/Xorg.0.log
sudo nano /var/log/dmesg
There is also a command "dmesg" that I think gives the same info as viewing the file above.
The dmesg file was where I found this:
There was also a hint in the Xorg.0.log file. The error messages are preceded by "(EE)" making them easy to spot.

Installing the driver was a matter of downloading the file from nvidia and then running it.
This may not be the best solution because I have been told think that manually installing a driver like this may break the auto update.