k i got my distro (mandriva 10) working fine and dandy but i dont think my grafics driver is working. at first my sound one wasnt working either but when i installed the sound driver under windows it also started working for mandriva (why i dont know but i am not complaining)

so i only got my grafics driver problem. if i check the "configure your desktop" thing and go to hardware (i think this opens harddrake) i see all my cards and stuff and there is my nvida fx5200 device. but it is not working becasue if i try and open any big graphics applications (with wine) i am not able to and someone told me my graphics card is not working but i am not that sure.

can someone please help me.

nvidia provides a driver for linux that's actually quite good. You can download it from their website. You might want to check the list of supported cards to make sure yours is listed. Before you do that, open you xorg.conf file in a text viewer, scroll down to the graphics device section and see what is set as the driver. It's probably vesa, which would explain why graphics-intesive programs don't work. Even the nv driver that comes with xorg is lacking in capability. If you do install the new driver you'll have to edit that line and change it to nvidia.

Open a konsole/terminal window, and type the command that will give you the kernel name/number.

Then open the mandriva control centre (configure my computer), into the Software manager > RPMdrake + and look down the list of software packages available, there should be one that is nearly identical to the kernel name/number you got from above instruction, except it will be called "kernel-sources-2.6.whatever" not just "kernel-2.6.whatever".

Install the kernel-sources - they are needed for the nvidia installer to make the kernel module for your system.

then go to the nvidia.com site and get the latest version of the driver for your systems architecture and the readme text file.

If you can print off the instructions all the better (you shouldn't need all the Q and A trouble shooting stuff, just the main instructions.

Then just follow them - the only bit you might need to know extra, is how to stop the X server. I used to be able to do that by doing Ctrl+alt+delete at the same time (you might need to do that more than once - the most I had to do was about 5 times).

Then when you have the text login page, you should be able to just follow the instructions - you know when you have the driver installed as it tells you (or it tells you if theres an error/problem for some reason).

Those instructions tell you what to put in the xorg.conf file, but you will have to work out which text editor you have (probably VI or VIM) so you know how to bring up the xorg.conf file and make the edit (only a couple of lines, but they're listed in the instructions).

You'll know if you've got it right, because you should then see the nvidia splash screen when you reboot.