DISCUSSION: nForce2 ATI Radeon 9600XT Acceleration Manual

This thread is to discuss the article titled: nForce2 ATI Radeon 9600XT Acceleration Manual

I thought I'd add some feedback for this guide, with my own experience.
As a new linux user, obviously some of the things I point out will get a natural response of "well thats obvious".. But being as the author has gone to the effort of actually going step by step through a kernel rebuild, I'm assuming that I'm the type of user it's also aimed at.

Firstly, I couldn't get my card to work after this (glxgears is actually slower).. but never mind. I will keep trying!

Other than that, when you reach the grub configuration stage, you say to edit the grub.conf file. On my system, grub.conf is not a symbolic link so I went to menu.lst and made the changes. the guide doesn't mention menu.lst.
There's actually a typo in the example config also. In the grub one, you have the old kernel image down in the new "pasted" section for the 3d accelerated image. This should be changed to the vmlinuz-2.4.26

You also mention that although there is no initrd line in the new configuration, we can make one later. Could you add the line in there to make it.
I think I used

$ mkinitrd -k /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26 -i /boot/initrd-2.4.26

in Suse 9 to make mine.

Otherwise, an excellent step by step guide and if nothing else, I managed to get through a kernel rebuild with only a few weeks experience!


Thanks
Nigel

Nigel is quite right, I have made a typo in the grub config section. Please all using this guide, make the appropriate change.

[Moderators, can you please give me access to my post to make these changes]

I was not aware of the existence of 'menu.lst'. I guess that explains why grub knows about changes after exiting the grub.conf. I also wasn't aware that you could have grub running without the existence of a grub.conf.

Finally, the initrd thing was also pointed out to me by Sean since I write the article. I didn't realise that an inird file was nescessary for ext3 partitions to be mounted. Without it, ext3 is mounted as ext 2 and therefore you lose journalling.

Please all follow Nigel's step to get an initrd file built.

sausagejohnson, feel free to send me any changes you'd like made to the article. At this time there is unfortunately no edit facility for LinuxAnswers.

--jeremy

That's ok. Under section 22) in the code box, please change:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 ro root=/dev/hda<whatever>

to:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26 ro root=/dev/hda<whatever>

Done.

--jeremy

This information is now very old and out of date. For new kernels, driver and configuration, refer to: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page