Guest siko9 Posted February 26, 2003 Report Share Posted February 26, 2003 Hi, I have several questions regarding nVidia video cards I have PC "A" with Windows and a GF2 MX200, and PC "B" with Linux (ok, trying to) and a S3 virge. I might buy a GF4 MX4xx so I have these doubts 1) Would it be safer to swap GF2 for GF4 in the Win PC "A", and use GF2 with Linux? 2) How hard would it be to run GF4 with mdk 8x and 9x? 3) What are my chances to have any of the GF cards running with older Linux distros (not just mdk), lets say mdk 7, red hat 6, corel linux? I know the questions cover a wide range of versions and distros, but I have to confess that I like every new release, less and less (again, not mdk but generally speaking). Thanks in advance. siko9. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted February 27, 2003 Report Share Posted February 27, 2003 Hi 1) Would it be safer to swap GF2 for GF4 in the Win PC "A", and use GF2 with Linux? Yes man. This is what I use on my main computer with MDK. You can even download the nVidia driver for Linux on the nVidia website ( www.nividia.com ). 2) How hard would it be to run GF4 with mdk 8x and 9x? It wouldn't be harder than a GF2 with the same OS since it is the same driver.. exactly as in Windows. 3) What are my chances to have any of the GF cards running with older Linux distros (not just mdk), lets say mdk 7, red hat 6, corel linux? It will run #1 on all distro. If the distro or Linux version isn't specified on the nVidia site (I think they support MDK 9, RedHat 8, Suse and UnitedLinux), download the .src.rpm kernel and glx driver (2 things to download) and recompile them. If you use a non-rpm based distro you can download the .tar.gz archives and compile them yourself. On an rpm-based distro (MDK, RedHat and Suse are) you first install the kernel source ('urpmi kernel-source' on a MDK machine) and then recompile the drivers by doing this: rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel NVIDIA_glx then you install the drivers by doing rpm -ivh /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i586/NVIDIA* On an non-rpm based distro read the README file in the archive. Basically you have to ./configure make make install Now you have to modify /etc/X11/XF86config-4 to load the driver. You have to add Load "glx" in the 'Section "Module"' section and add Driver "nvidia" in the 'Section "Device"' section. Now restart X by pressing CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. You should see the nVidia logo. You can still search the forum as lot of people ask questions on that. Hope this help Good luck ! MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted February 27, 2003 Report Share Posted February 27, 2003 Wait, hold on.. I think there is a limit of how old a distro that can be supported by NVidia's own driver. Since NVidia's driver can only work on Xfree 4.xx instead of 3.xx, only Mandrake 7.2 up and RedHat 7.1 up can be used. I am not sure how good a support Xfree 3.xx's own driver with NVidia chipset, but I have a feeling it will not be as good as NVidia's own driver. So you need to check whether the distro fulfill the requirements that NVidia specified. Other than that, I agree with MottS, installing Nvidia driver should be cake as long as you have kernel-sources installed and you downloaded the .src rpm or the tarballs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest siko9 Posted February 27, 2003 Report Share Posted February 27, 2003 Hi, thanks for your answers, specially about XFree versions and the step-by-step guides, very helpful considering my limited time. I guess I'll buy de GF4, but I forgot to mention somethng thou: compiling is THE thing that pisses me off about Linuxes, I just don't have enouh time. I hope I can make the card work in an hour or two, otherwise, Tux community will loose an adept (like 1 guy counts :wink: ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted February 27, 2003 Report Share Posted February 27, 2003 Don't worry about compiling something as small as NVidia driver.. Unless you have something really old like a 486, compiling and installing NVidia driver takes as little as 1 minute, with no rebooting involved. Which is about the same time wasted installing NVidia windows driver and rebooting. (Not to mention that the size of the drivers are about one quarter of the size of the windows driver, therefore reducing download time). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted February 27, 2003 Report Share Posted February 27, 2003 DragonMage is right.. it does not take that long to compile the drivers and installing it. It takes even shorter if you can get pre-compiled drivers from the nVidia site. Again, they provide pre-compiled drivers for a couple of distro/version. Look at that: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_di...y_ia32_1.0-4191 As you can see they support Redhat 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 Mandrake 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0 SuSe 7.2, 7.3, 8.0 and 8.1 United Linux 1.0 So no need to recompile anything if you use one of those distro/version MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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