[mythtvnz] Update on my M5A97 Evo / GT220 / Nvidia driver problems

[Stephen Worthington]

I mentioned in a earlier thread that I had problems running Mythbuntu
12.04 on my new Asus M5A87 Evo motherboard with its Nvidia GT220 card.
Using the Nvidia drivers always resulted in a totally blank screen,
including the TTYs.  All the different Nvidia drivers I had tried did
not work.  Well, today I installed the xorg-edgers PPA (bleeding edge
versions of various Ubuntu packages):

  http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/xorg-edgers
  https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

and allowed it to upgrade (but not dist-upgrade).  That got me a beta
Nvidia driver package just two days old:

  304.32-0ubuntu1~xedgers~precise1

and then the Nvidia drivers worked again.  I am not sure if it was the
drivers, or the updated Xorg packages that were also pulled in during
the upgrade, that fixed things.  But I could not see any problems in
the short amount of testing I was able to do before I had to reboot to
the production system for the next recording.

The advice on the xorg-edgers site is to upgrade to all of their
packages, as they are built against each other and you can get subtle
problems with mismatched packages otherwise.  So I have also now done
a dist-upgrade, which brought me a 3.5.0-8.8 kernel.  I would prefer
to be a little less bleeding edge than that, so I will have to do a
fair bit more testing to make sure that nothing bad is happening, but
it is looking hopeful as I was able to boot that with the new Nvidia
drivers and it still all seemed to be working.  Next I will have to
see if I can compile the drivers for my TBS 5922 USB DVB-S receiver
and make a patched kernel to run sasc-ng so that I can record Sky
directly from DVB-S.

So I am hopeful that shortly I will finally be able to upgrade to
Mythbuntu 12.04 and MythTV 0.25.