Hey hey everyone…

I bought a copy of Mandrake 9.1 on eBay last week, and just tried to install it today. Everything went fine, I partitioned my drive with Win98 on it already, set the whole thing up and rebooted. I get to (Lilo?) the boot manager, and have the option to choose what I want to boot. Selecting Linux brings up a Mandrake Linux boot screen, where it goes through and initializes things (that’s what I’m assuming it’s doing). Toward the end, the screen begins to flicker. With each flicker the rapidity increases, then I go to some sort of shell prompt for my user name and password.

I put both in, and then I get a prompt. From a little reading around I discovered that typing ‘xstart’ is supposed to bring up the GUI. Unfortunately neither ‘xstart’ nor ‘kde’ brings up a GUI, just a big screen with a lot of words. The important stuff (I would assume) is that the blasted thing cannot initialize the NVIDIA kernel module. [edit] There's also something about pages being found but none useable, I can't remember exactly)

Now, I know I’m supposed to download a new something or other, but I’m a windows hick, and this is the first time I’ve had to use a prompt exclusively (heck, I don’t even know DOS commands). I haven’t the faintest notion of how to go about doing that without a GUI.

During the install mandrake detected my video card as a ‘Nvidia GeForce 2 DDR (generic)’. I don’t think it’s a DDR, all I know is that it’s a GeForce 2 MX 400 with 64MB of RAM. There is no GeForce 2 MX option in the troubleshooter dohicky for X, just a GeForce 2 integrated and the one mentioned above.

Any help would be much appreciated.

login to root and type XFdrake to setup you graphics. Once thats done it startx to start your gui. If the gui comes up then a reboot should alway start you off in the gui. By the way my daughter has the same video card and it work out of the box.

I went through XFdrake, and tried using every Nvidia card it listed, still nothing. My card is a PCI variant of the GeForce 2, not APG, would that have anything to do with it?

Did you by any chance load the drivers from the NVIDIA site

That, friend, is the problem. I am unfamiliar with the mystical methods used to transfer files downloaded through Win98 over to a partition Win98 doesn’t even see. And, as mentioned before, I’m totally ignorant about anything Linux wise, so I’m unsure if it’s even possible to start up a browser or similar internet agent to do the transfer from Linux itself…

Yes dl them as you would any file. Then in Linux you should be a to navigate to the windows directory and copy them to your linux side. The path to the windows dir should be /mnt/win_c /mnt/win_d and so foreth once copied to a linux partition. You should be looking for a file called NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run. Since you don't have any graphics log into root - navigate to the file location. and type in sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run and follow the on-screen instructions

Ok, thanks. Just to be sure, would the following be correct?

login as root
navigate to the folder:
/mnt/win_c/downloads/

run the program:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run

follow on-screen instructions?

If it a win98 format file system yep it shur will.

Yeah, it's 98. NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run download at 55%

Yay! It's working now. KDE, cool...


Ew... small fonts, nasty slow mouse.


Thanks for the help.

Hmmm a slow mouse. Did you try reconfiging the mouse to see if that helps?

Yeah, I managed to locate that option. Mouse Acceleration, not something I would have chosen to use in leu of the standard 'mouse speed'. I'll get used to it.

Fonts are nasty in Mozilla and Firebird, they look fine in Konquerer though, guess I'll have to troll the mozilla help forums to find a fix.

No sound either, which gets on ones nerves after awhile. I'm running a Soundblaster Live! card, in the Control Center it says that I'm using Type 10: ASLA emulation, whatever that means.

sound is mutted by default. select Multimedia>sound>aumix and turn the sound up.

I've tried that. Every time I close the aumix thingy, it reverts back to everything muted. (clicking the mute option in the menubar brings it up as muted)

I can adjust the volume levers, but it doesn't do anything. If I take it off mute, save and close, then reopen it, it's muted again.

I got the sound working, by nuking my onboard audio. *jams to cadet*

However, I had to re-install my Nvidia drivers again after editing the BIOS. I'll check the config file, but I'm sure I did everything right, and saved it after editing. I was logged in as root too...