Fix Revo NVIDIA Driver Error

Written by Joshua Lyon on 09 February 2010.

After running an upgrade 'sudo apt-get upgrade' and 'sudo apt-get install xbmc' to get my system up to date (to the latest SVN) I started getting the following error:

XBMC needs hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering.
Install an appropriate graphics driver.

Please consult XBMC Wiki for supported hardware
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Supported_hardware

The first time I had this happen to me, I spent a number of hours trying to figure out how to get my system back up... but by 3 am I gave up. The next day, I reran the XBMC Live installer and got my system back up. This time, I didn't want to have to redo all the changes I made, so I wanted to fix things. I did a bit of research and this time I tried to directly install the nvidia drivers right away before mucking around with my configuration.

I originally tried the following which did NOT work for me:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-185-kernel-source nvidia-glx-185 nvidia-settings mesa-utils

Then reboot with 'sudo reboot', but like I said it didn't fix my issue... so I ran the NVIDIA installer directly as noted in this thread:

sudo apt-get remove xbmc-live
sudo nvidia-installer --update -a -s -f
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc-live
sudo reboot

After a reboot, my system came back up and worked like a champ with the latest version of XBMC (and the NVIDIA drivers) installed.

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Comments

123

0 #22 Matt 2011-04-13 01:46

I've got the Dharma 10.1 XBMC Live.
How do I know what NVidia drivers I've got? Do I even need to update them? Is it worth updating XBMC from the SVN? Or is 10.1 the latest anyway?

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0 #21 Jason 2011-03-27 21:07

You, sir, are a legend.

That worked like a charm.

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0 #20 FreeMan 2010-12-15 05:45

Finally got it working!

Check the xmbc forum link for details.

Thanks!

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0 #19 FreeMan 2010-12-15 05:16

I cannot get the nvidia drivers to update. It keeps trying to recompile the kernel.

I installed make, then it complained that it didn't have the kernel source. Ubuntu's man pages have dire warnings about recompiling the kernel, especially for driver installs.

Full details of my tribulation here:
forum.xbmc.org/.../
Any other thoughts?

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0 #18 greg 2010-11-07 11:38

josh you are a CHAMPION, THIS WORKED FOR ME, ACER REVO R3600.

i had my reservations about uninstalling xbmc and i have so much media all scraped and archived, so i backed up my userdata folder (took ages) but upon "sudo apt-get install xbmc-live" it all came back to life, complete all my library and all.

if it's any use to anyone googleing: i had the open GL error, then nvidia won't update cause of the x server running, so i uninstalled, updated, and reinstalled.

josh: is there a page for the tutorial of how to get the sleep command stuff to work you mentioned in the last reply? i leave my revo on as other xmbc clients play the media off the attached HDDs, and also a transmission client runs on it, if i sleep it like you have would they still run?

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0 #17 Joshua Lyon 2010-11-01 03:27

@Konrad: I did find something of a workaround to get the remote control to power on the Revo 1600. Instead of having the power button of XBMC mapped to fully power off the Revo (shutdown), I set the power button to suspend the box. This puts the box in an ultra-low power state, but keeps the key things in memory. Then when I push the power button on the remote, the box will come out of the suspend mode and start back up. This is actually very similar to how your cable box and other AV components work. There's some other benefits to using the suspend mode as well -- in addition to you getting the capability to 'power on' and 'power off' your Revo, the box will also startup and shutdown a lot faster since it doesn't have to completely close everything out and start it all back up.

In the long run, I decided to add some 'server' features to my Revo and since it already consumes such little power I decided to leave the box on all the time.

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