I changed out an ATI card from a mandrake 10 official box for a geforce2 DDR. On boot up, it recognized that the ATI card was gone and the geforce2 DDR was installed. Mandrake 10 went through its "install" process for the nvidia card. Everything went well. Of course, the basic nvidia driver that was installed was the "nv" driver. I logged into root and took the following actions:

1. Downloaded the latest nvidia driver
2. Edited XF86Config-4 to change "nv" to "nvidia" and checked to make sure "dri" and "Glcore" were not present.
3. At command line ran init 3
4. Logged on as root at the command line
5. ran sh *.run (it was the only .run file in the directory I downloaded it too)
6. the nvidia program ran and complied the module. The message was that the install was "successful"
7. I ran startx and then get the following error message:

"Failed to initialize the NVIDIA graphics device

Okay where did I go wrong?

Oh I have since used vim /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to make sure the changes: "nv" -> "nvidia" did indeed take place.

I received this same exact error on attempts to operate a legacy nVidia Display Card with the same drivers, that were posted to support it. These drivers were received from www.nVidia.com. The only information I received was a few forum posts expressed the cause to be a tainted kernel provided by nVidia. However, on a post I made earlier today, I have been informed that the tainted kernel from nVidia has absolutely nothing to do with performance. Assistance is requested...

I have run the Geforce2 DDR card in another Linux machine but it was running gentoo. Whatever 3D nvidia driver gentoo used in their "emerge" worked really well. I upgraded that computer and wanted to use this one in a mandrake box.

I attempted the install on a Red Hat 9 Linux box. I would really like to use this driver (and graphics card) for Linux, but will not if, I can not get my legacy nVidia card working correctly on Linux.