Hey all. Alright, I'm kind of at the end of my rope. I've tried to find a distro of Linux that's suitable for me, but it's just not happening so far. The underlying issue is usually that the distro doesn't recognize my GPUs properly. I have SLI (2 GPUs) 8800GT 1 gig cards.

So far, I've tried Fedora 9, and none of the drivers worked with my 8800GT cards. I was told that full support wasn't really offered on fedora 9 for SLI 8800GTs.
Then I tried OpenSuSE. That was a bust too, for the same reason
I then tried to go the BSD route by getting FreeBSD, but that didn't work either. I don't know what the problem was, after install it hung on boot with a really pixelated, static-TV-channels-looking screen. My guess is that the 8800GTs were the culprit again.
Just now I attempted OpenSolaris. That had great support. It recognized everything right away....too bad I hate everything else about the OS.
Also, before anyone suggests them, I've tried Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Although both did great at recognizing my hardware, I don't like either of them. They remind me too much of windows. It doesn't even look like a different OS, it's more like a new windows theme with a different shell to match. Yuck.

So, what can I get that will work with my 8800GT cards? I can't handle a horrid resolution, I'd like the 1680x1050 my monitor is capable of. I don't want something that's too windows-like. Also, I'd prefer something that isn't totally unsupported or unused. OpenSolaris, which I realize isn't exactly 'Linux' by conventional terms, didn't use .rpm or .deb files, but its own whacky files. That's just absurd, and you can't really find anything that's made for it. With something that's rpm based, anything you want exists freely to download because so many people use it. My initial appeal to Fedora or openSuSE came from their huge user base.

Anyway, I can figure most of that stuff out on my own, my real issue is getting a good list of distros that have SLI support for 8800GTs and aren't Ubuntu, Opensolaris, or Linux Mint.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Welcome to the world of *nix. Speaking in general terms, linux does not have support for all of the same hardware that windows does. This is typically a direct result of the hardware vendor not offering a linux driver. The only option, with no support from the vendor, is to reverse engineer the windows driver.

That being said you may need to make some hardware changes if you really want to run linux.

Any distro will work with those cards. In order to get harware acceleration you need the proprietary Nvidia drivers ... "Which is the best distro?" is an insulting question based on ignorance.

The irony in your post is almost too much to handle. Post based on ignorance, eh? I've been told by many people on this forum (and many others that have had identical issues) that dual 8800GT cards do not work on Fedora 9 with the new X stuff or something along those lines. Basically, it freezes up instantly. I've tried the drivers, and I've tried the non-proprietary ones too. I've already stated this in my original post.

I've tried other distros which had the same issue, as I've already stated, and some distro sites even specifically state that they do not yet support SLI.

So before you come in here pretending to be a big badass, shooting down questions regarding particular distros just because you have some sort of predisposed notion that anyone with such a question is immediately below your pseudo-superior self, consider that I've actually researched and tested my question beforehand. I've hit a brick wall because SLI support seems to be in short supply. I don't have time to try every distro imaginable, so I came here to see if anyone had experience with this particular situation. How unreasonable of me.

Oh, and, to the other poster: I'm not willing to get rid of my two expensive cards to run a free OS. Linux is cool, but not that cool. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do any sort of self-compiling here. There have to be some flavors of linux that support my cards. I know for a fact that Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris did.

Anyway, if anyone without a superiority complex wants to supply me with a suggestion or two, I'd appreciate it, thanks

I agree that the "based on ignorance" comment was highly inappropriate.

t3hpimpz0r, what version of the driver did the distros you tried use? If I was you I'd consider downloading the latest and greatest version directly from NVIDIA. At the time of this post, that would be version 177.80, released October 7, 2008. Chapter 25 of the included documentation deals with SLI and should prove useful to you as far as troubleshooting and stuff is concerned. BTW, what brand/model CPU does your box have?

Unfortunately, you'll get that type of answer from some members. Fortunately, they are a minority.

No apology from me. I looked around the net a bit and found that while F9 has had problems in the past, they seem to be fixed now. F8 always worked well. The OP says he found 3 or 4 distros that recognize and install the drivers fine. It is obviously not a Linux problem. If the OP is any good at tweaking, he can make it work. If not, as he says, there are solutions available.

I have been using an SLI setup for over a year. No tweaking, no pain. From day one, install the proprietary drivers ... done. I'm sure my distro is not unique in that ability.

If you don't want to apologize, that's fine (nobody asked you to).

But saying essentially "it works for me so it should work for you" is extremely non-constructive.

Thanks a lot for the responses. Alright, I am certainly going to give fedora 9 another try now that I know they released new drivers. my last failure of Fedora 9 happened maybe two weeks prior to that release. If that fixes it, it would be great.

rickh, I'm just asking for a list of distros with known support for these cards. Which one are you using with your SLI, Debian? Maybe I'd like it too, I haven't tried it yet... that's all I'm getting at here. I didn't find 3 or 4 that had the drivers install nicely, in fact upon installing the drivers everything seemed to die. I found 3 or 4 that worked right out of the box, and I didn't particularly like those 3 or 4, and I explained why. Ubuntu and linux mint just aren't my thing.

As for the other posts, thank you as well. I will definitely read the SLI instructions and post back when I try Fedora 9 for the 8th? time.

I don't think anyone took offense at that statement. If they did I apologize. Offense was taken at my contention that "Which distro... best" questions are an exercise in ignorance. For that I do not apologize.

To my absolute surprise, fedora 9 installed and immediately gave me a 1680x1050 resolution, something it was not capable of doing on my last ...like 8? installs. I update the kernel and all other crap with yum update.

Works fine, it seems. Go to nvidia, get the drivers....install, and then the problems come. First, no logo from nvidia, then it doesn't start x. Screen flickers and gives text login. If I type startx, It says 'no screens' detected. Above that it gave the error about no devices found. Well, per instructions from other forums, I put the line: BusID "PCI:03:00:0" in my xorg.conf file. Start up x, and it seems to work. Glxgears give me a crazy good frame rate, and I seem happy...2 mins later, everything locks up except for the mouse movement.

Basically, this is the problem I had before. Everything just freezes, and its not during any certain thing. It happens more and more frequently. I try everything; I must have edited xorg.conf like 3 millions times. Sometimes, when it freezes and locks up, I manage to hit ctrl alt f1 fast enough to see some error output. It gives the error of unable to load module "type1" blah blah, and then it says (nautilus) unable to add monitor: not supported. Yeah, it's a mess. Sometimes, even if I start in runlevel 3, the commandline freezes. I'm able to type, but none of the commands do anything. ctrl C, rather than stopping commands, shows up as though I'm typing ^C. That could just be a random issue, because it happens maybe a third of the time while x freezing happens EVERY time. Once x freezes, the commandline is automatically messed up. I'm forced to do the force-shutdown method of holding the power button.

So yeah, this sucks. I just reinstalled, and it's fine. Getting the yum updates now. What's next? Trying livna drivers? Sure. If this isn't proof that fedora 9 doesn't work with my hardware, I don't know what is. Anyone had an issue like this at all?

----------------------------------------UBER EDIT--------------------------------------------------
Wow, I just had a huge breakthrough. I did not install either the livna drivers nor the proprietary nvidia ones. I just did yum update, and let it finish. It froze after a restart and a few minutes of usage!! This means that it wasn't the drivers! Holy crap, I've been wrong for months and months.

Now I'm running on the older kernel. The other updates are still on, but the kernel isn't the latest one, but the original one that came on the disk. I've been running it for about a half hour without any freezing. It seems to work great! Sooo, what do I do now? I think I just always installed video drivers too soon, and just assumed that they were the culprit because they never detected my cards/screen automatically.

Can I install graphics drivers for this older kernel? How do I delete the new kernel and never install it again? Is there a way to just fix the new kernel or find out why it's dying on me? Any info would be appreciated (oh, and I do realize that my questions are totally different from the thread title, but oh well).