I installed Mandriva 2008 and like its predecessors since about 2001 my NVidia MX440 was not supported properly. I tried to install NVidia's drivers which of course need the kernel source files. The install program complained that I did not have the source files installed, however, I can't find what I would expect to be the right file, kernel-desktop-sources-2.6.22.9-1mdv to go along with the currently install kernel, kernel-desktop-2.6.22.9-1mdv. I tried kernel-sources-2.6.22.9-1mdv, but that did not work. Any advice?

Thanks,
-Chris

[moved from Games by spinynorman]

I just use the three "latest" files personaly.

urpmi kernel-desktop-latest kernel-desktop-devel-latest kernel-source-latest

and then since have nvidia...

urpmi dkms-nvidia

I have already installed the "latest" files you mention. This grabs the files I included in my original post. The problem is that the kernel-sources rpm does not seem to match with the kernel-desktop rpm (or at least the nvidia installer thinks they don't).

I don't want to use dkms files as they have never worked for me. Desktop apps will run ok but games run painfully slow if it all. GLX apps are extremely unstable.

-Chris

Dark's suggestion is the way to go. If you install "latest" and boot your computer using the "latest" kernel as your default, everything will work OK.
And you can't expect good game performance from MX440. Had one some four years ago, and performance-wise it was MUCH slower than an archaic GeForce2 Ti200.

I already have the "latest" rpms installed. The Nvidia installer still thinks kernel-desktop-2.6.22.9-1mdv does not match with kernel-sources-2.6.22.9-1mdv. Someone must have tried to compile something against the kernel; this would affect more than just video drivers.

I know the performance will not be great but in the past, with much screwing around, I have been able to play games like Supertux fine with the nvidia supplied drivers. With the Mandriva package nvidia drivers such games will play at maybe 1 fps then crash.

Um, I beleive kernel 2.6.22.9-1 is the stock kernel of the 2008 install. If you installed the latest meta packages then you should have kernel 2.6.22.12-1 and kernel source as 2.6.22.12-1 as those are the latest versions when I look at the update repo. what does uname -r return?

Please open a terminal, and post the output of

[root@localhost chris]# rpm -qa |grep nvidia
[root@localhost chris]# rpm -qa |grep kernel
kernel-source-2.6.22.9-1mdv-1-1mdv2008.0
kernel-desktop-devel-2.6.22.9-1mdv-1-1mdv2008.0
kernel-desktop-2.6.22.9-1mdv-1-1mdv2008.0
kernel-desktop-latest-2.6.22.9-1mdv2008.0
kernel-desktop-devel-latest-2.6.22.9-1mdv2008.0
kernel-source-latest-2.6.22.9-1mdv2008.0

I have removed the prepackaged nvidia rpms as I want to use the driver supplied directly by nvidia.

A couple of things:
dkms is the way to go. I used to have trouble with them, but no longer.
Wasn't there a kernel-source problem with the release kernel? It seems like the update kernel came rather quickly to correct some errors. Update your kernel.

After you update your kernel (if you choose to do so)... a quick search shows that this kernel module should work for your graphics card.

Yes it was (silly thing to do a major release with flawed backbone, but Mandriva has got all of us used to that kind of stuff...), but since he has already done (?) "urpmi kernel-desktop-latest blah blah" and he still has 2.6.22.9-1, he hasn't configured urpmi sources yet. Maybe it's time to go back to lesson one which is suprisingly often skipped as unnecessary...