newbie nvidia problem
 

Hi,
I've heard a lot of good things about linux and decided to try it out on my laptop. Mandrake was recommended to me as being pretty easy to learn/use. I figure I'll try it out and if i like it then possibly spend time to learn more about it. I downloaded the iso's of 9.0 and formatted and installed on my laptop. I have a geforce2 go on the laptop and the generic drivers do not work at all. From what i've read i'll need to download the individual files and install them myself. It seems that other people have had problems with this as well, but I was not able to find instructions on how to do this. Does anyone know of any or had any success with this that would be able to explain how to do this to me?

Assume that I know a decent amount about computers in general but know nothing about linux, commands in general, language or otherwise. Maybe the exact commands i would have to type for example would help. Or if there is a link to existing instructions that would be great too. Oh, and If anyone thinks I should start out on a different version than Mandrake 9.0 feel free to tell me that too.

Thanks for helping a total newbie

Welcome to LQ... erm, naked dude.

You need to go to nvidia.com and go through the drivers section to download the latest GF2 drivers. Go for the .tar.gz ones as these, I have found, tend to be both the easiest to install and also allow you the most flexibility.

Once you've downloaded both the 'kernel' and 'glx' .tar.gz files, boot into Linux and move to the directory where they are. Type tar zxpvf nvidia-kernel...something...tar.gz, move into the directory that was created (cd dirname). Change to the user 'root' by typing su root, press enter and enter the root's password. Then type make install and hopefully the nvidia kernel drivers should install OK. Type exit to leave root mode. If you get any errrors, post them here.

Move down a dir again (cd ..) and type tar zxpvf nvidia-glx...something...tar.gz and move into the glx dir that was created. Again, become root (su root) and again type make install. Hopefully you won't have any probs, but then you know what to do should you get anything bad... post here! Stay in root mode and move into the dir /etc/X11 and type cp XF86Config-4 XF86Config-4.original (this creates a backup of your current graphics drivers setup) and then edit the file (emacs XF86Config-4) and put in the appropriate parts (load 'glx' and change 'driver = "nv"' to 'driver = "nvidia"').

Basically, if nothing goes wrong, it's really straightforeward, and is detailed really well in the readme that's also on the nvidia site.

Good luck.

Thanks for posting an answer. Using what you wrote and a couple other sites i managed to dowload both tar files onto a cd and then copy those into tmp and unpack them. I managed to get into the dir too and typed 'make install'. This worked fine for the GLX but not for the kernel. Here's what i got:

"You appear to be compiling the NVdriver kernel module with a compiler different from the one that was used to compile the running kernel. This may be perfectly fine, but there are some cases where this can lead to unexpected behavior and system crashes.

If you know what you are doing and want to override this check you can do so by setting IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH.

In any other case set the CC environment variable to the name of the compiler that was used to compile the kernel"

Definately over my head here since i have no knowledge of programming, commands and such. Any further help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

Oh yeah, I should mention that I did take a look at the NVIDIA readme and followed the section for that error. while 'cat /proc/version' worked and told me that i am running version 3.2, 'gcc -v' didn't do anything for me. I know that I am over my head here so i'm guessing i need to be in a certain directory or put a certain command before 'gcc -v' for it to work.

Actually it appears that the linux build version is 2.4 and the gcc version is 3.2. Bear with me here as this is the first time ever I'm doing this. Sorry. Now that I've figured that out I'm stuck.

Yeah, the Linux version number would be 2.4.something (check with uname -r) and you GCC (i.e. the compiler) is version 3.2. They're different programs, so you would not expect them to be the same version. Basically, what the error is saying is that "your kernel was compiled with version X of GCC and you're running version Y of GCC, there may be problems if you continue, but then again, there might not be." I believe if you type export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH you could get it working, but as the readme explains, you might get some problems.

export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH didn't do anything for me. I tried typing it before and after 'make install' too. still getting the same message.

OK, you should try RPM's, although linux drivers from Nvidia (I have geforce2 too) didn't work with my md9 either.
That's propably because there is mandrake and redhat kernel specific drivers (both use own custom kernels), wich are a bit outdated. There is not yet drivers for md9 or rh8, and installing generic drivers (eg. messing with wrong kernel) cause your XFree to crash, meaning you cant use X and reinstalling XFree86 from cd in console mode is not easy (experience talks)...
You just have to wait.

Actually there is way to get NVIDIA drivers for 9.0 now, but it requires a bit work. I downloaded the sources, and readme told me this:
This is quite hebrew for myself, someone?
Should I write to place of "my-smp-kernel" my kernel version number (2.4.19-16mdk)?

Well, you see, you're not building the nVidia drivers for another kernel version to the one that you're running. The above code is for when you want to build a driver for someone else's system... for example.