Getting And Installing The Drivers

Due to the license of nVidia's drivers, they can not be distributed with the base distribution, you will find them in M's commercial releases, though.
XFree comes with its own nVidia driver. This driver has been proven to be more stable on some systems, but it does not offer many of the nice features of the proprietary driver including accelerated 3D performance. This is the driver which is installed by default in releases 7.2 and later if M's installer detects an nVidia card.
If you use earlier releases, update your XFree packages to version 4.1 or later, get the latest version of XFdrake ('drakxtools-newt'), run it on the console and let it write a configuration file. Then proceed as follows.

To get the latest proprietary drivers, visit nVidia's Linux driver page, they offer drivers for the last three releases of Mandrake or so, for one-processor systems as well as for SMP systems.
The driver consists of two separate packages: a kernel module, 'NVIDIA_kernel', and the XFree GL driver, 'NVIDIA_glx'. Get them and install them (as 'root'):

rpm -ivh NVIDIA*

You will get some messages telling you about moved files (nVidia has its own OpenGL implementation), but apart from that, everything should go swimmingly. What's left to do is making some small changes to XFree's configuration file.

If you are running Mandrake Linux 8.1, all you have to do is to run 'XFdrake' again, choose a resolution and then restart X.

If you are using an older release, edit '/etc/X11/XF86Config-4' as 'root' in an editor. Go to Section "Module" and add this line belowLoad "freetype":

Load "glx"

On the other hand, if your 'XF86Config-4' contains these lines:

Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"

nVidia advises you to remove them.

Now scroll down to the 'Graphics device section'. You'll find a line

Driver "nv"

Driver "nvidia"

That's it! Restart X and you should be set.

Note: If you are using a different kernel than the default distribution kernel, you will have to get the source RPM of the nVidia kernel module and rebuild it. For this, you will need the packages kernel-source, gcc, make and rpm-build. To rebuild, run (as 'root'):

rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-[version]_src.rpm

You will find the rebuild package in '/usr/src/RPM/RPMS/[arch]'. Notice that you have to use the same gcc version for rebuilding the packages you used to compile the kernel.

If you experience hang-ups with these drivers and are willing to do some fiddling, you might want to read Bernhard Kuhn's Nvidia driver tips (local text file).

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GeForce2 Go

The procedure seems to be a little bit different for the GeForce2 chip, used in some of the latest laptops. This is quoted from an article on Mandrake Forum, slightly edited for clarity (I hope ;-)):

I just recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a GeForce2 Go chip.I 've been reading the threads on the mailing list, as well as information posted here and here at MandrakeForum.

As described, it was only "Preliminary" support for the GeForce2 card. I couldn't find many HOWTOs, articles, or other related material to get this card working, until I finally got fed up and searched a dozen or so pages atGoogle and finally hit this page which described Red Hat 7.1 and a GeForce2 Go chip on a laptop. Below are the Mandrake 8 instructions:

1. Install Nvidia Driver
   • Make sure you have the RPMS 'kernel-source', 'gcc', 'make' and 'rpm-build' installed.
   • Goto the Nvidia Website and get the drivers.
   • Download the latest NVIDIA_kernel source rpm
   • Download the latest NVIDIA_driver rpm
   • Follow these instructions (as 'root'):
     rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-[version].src.rpm
rpm -ivh /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i686/NVIDIA_kernel-[version].i686.rpm
rpm -ivh NVIDIA_GLX-[version].i386.rpm
   • (If you can't get the src.rpm built, try the precompiled driver RPM from nVidia, tom)
2. Configure X:
   As per the original website, you can get an XF86Config-4 file for the 1600x1200 screen from Dell's Support site. I grabbed 'atimp316.rpm'. Install this rpm (it also puts a file in /dell which you can remove later).
   Now edit the file:
   

   1. In the Device section, make sure you have
      Driver "nvidia"

   2. In the module section, make sure you have:
      Load "glx"
      and remove these lines:
      Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"

   3. Under the section "Files" modify these lines (this is very important for mandrake)
      RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:-1"

   4. You might want to add this to the Screen section to get maximum resolution:
      Option "ignoreEDID" "1"

3. Now, in /etc/modules.conf, add this line to the end:

   options NVdriver NVreg_Mobile=1

   Have a look at /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA[...]/LAPTOP_README for more info.

Some important notes:

• Don't go into suspend mode or you'll end up having to power off/on (this has supposedly been fixed in driver revision 1.0-1512, tom).
• Every now and then X will segfault.

Hopefully this will make it to the first page so people don't stay up till 5am on a friday with an Nvidia headache :).

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GeForce 4

(Contributed by Mandrake Linux user oboltyo)

Just some info for anyone having probs with the GeForce4, for my system would not even load once lilo started. I found that I had to be sure that lilo was set to "normal" video ONLY (tom: vga=normal option in '/etc/lilo.conf') - this is with a Winfast GeForce4 a250.

The system would not boot in any other mode. Also I have used the nView with Linux with the geforce4 and it works very nice. Simple add the following options after getting your nvidia drivers working like so (each 'Option' on one line):

Option "TwinView" "true"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-95"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-160"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024, 1280x1024, 1024x768, 1024x768, 800x600, 800x600, 640x480, 640x480"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "crt,crt"
Option "Xinerama" "on"

You could try XFree86 -configure, but it was not picking things up properly for I figure X has not been set up with the GeForce4 yet.

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'Unreal' and 'Quake 3' on Mandrake