Hello,

I haven't seen much in the way of VM questions on here that were helpful, so I'll get it back in the open. I'm running a macbook pro with parallels. I've tried installing a copy of mandriva 08 which was working, it's just that I couldn't figure out any way to get the correct display drivers working. I've got an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT. This was my first installation so I have got absolutely NOOOO idea of how to get this to work. I got it to work with my wireless card, but no joy on the display. The drivers that come with the installation did not cover my card. Also, when I downloaded the file that was supposed to be correct according to other posts, I couldn't figure out how to open it. I got ugly after 10 hours or so and smashed my installation disk, but if given REALLY GOOD advice, I may try it again in the future. You've got to talk really slow and give me lots of detail because I'm only a fifth year engineering student. I'm willing to try again because of the math and science tools offered by linux and the fact that I absolutely despise windows. Unless I get something I can understand, I'm sticking to OS X.

Thanks.

~LJ~

If you are looking for the driver for your graphics card, you can get the driver and installation instructions fromthis page. Based on what you said your graphics card was you should choose GeForce and GeForce 8 Series. It is almost certain that unless you know otherwise (check the name of the file you downloaded that contained Mandriva 08) you should choose Linux 32-bit. If you scroll down far enough there are instructions.

It might be better, though, to download Ubuntu Linux which includes a "restricted driver manager" which will automatically download and setup the driver for you. You can get Ubuntu from ubuntu.com and once you have it installed just click on the "System" menu at the top and go to "Administration" and choose "Restricted Drivers Manager."

Hope that helps!

Thanks Zephyrcat,

That does seem to be useful information. I started downloading fedora core 7 earlier and will try this one out. If I have some of the same problems with the video driver, I'll check out that page to see if it works for this. It seems that this distribution should be a little more stable. One question though, you mentioned to use the 32 bit, but will the 64 bit work with backward compatibility?

Thanks for the info, it may very well prove useful yet.

~LJ~

First, I still recommend Ubuntu because of the Restricted Driver Manager. All you have to do is launch the program and let it get the driver. I am fairly certain (someone correct me if I am wrong) that you cannot run 64-bit software on a 32-bit Linux. Unless of course you downloaded 64-bit Linux.