hello nice people

well i owned a geforce 5500fx and earlier today i bought a geforce 6600gt. when i started linux, the resolution was of 800x600. i went in computer configuration to see my material. under video cards, it was just written "video card". no name or whatever. so i thought id reinstall the drivers. so i did the "init 3" thing, reinstalled the drivers and when i typed "startx". it didnt work. so i cant start x anymore.

what should i do?

What distro are you using?

You need to edit either /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf depending on the version of Xserver that you are using.

Edit it in a text editor such as pico or vim that dont need the X server running. Scroll down to the "Video" section, and check your settings. Change the settings as you need to, save the file and then try startx.

im on mandrake

well it doesnt detect it i think. i went in my x86config file and under "device" there was no boardname or vendor name. is there anyway to make linux redetect for cards?

Firstly: Does dmesg or lspci show your card? - You won't get it configured if it's not detected!

When you know it's detected, you can worry about configuring it. Assuming you're using xorg, you should have an app called "xorgconfig" or something similar. Run this, and put in the correct information when asked. Back up your existing conf. file in case you need to look up any answers from it.

Then there's the driver issue - nvidia cards have two drivers, "nv" and "nvidia". nv is open, nvidia is closed and usually has to be installed by you later.

That'll require you to manually change the "nv" driver to "nvidia" in the x11 config file, as per the many, many guides on the web. If this isn't done correctly, it could conceivably cause you problems.

If you've got a card that's detected, configured properly in X11's config, has the latest driver, and STILL doesn't work. . . then I'm out of ideas

well i think thats the problem, its not detected. at firse my x wouldnt start. i edited the xf86config file with vim and changed the drivers from "nv" to "nvidia" and now x starts. but the card's name isnt there :
Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

then when i type "lspci" i find :
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00f1 (rev a2)

dmesg gives like 20 pages but i think i found that :
Linux agpgart interface v0.100 (c) Dave Jones
agpgart: Detected an Intel 865 Chipset.
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 941M
agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xe0000000
nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
NVRM: loading NVIDIA Linux x86 NVIDIA Kernel Module 1.0-6629 Wed Nov 3 13:12:51 PST 2004
Supermount version 2.0.4 for kernel 2.6

but i dont really now what it is.
and for that application xorgconfig, where would i find that? i went in /etc/X11 and theres xorg.config and xf86config but i dont see any applications.

thanks for helping me

edit : oh i found the app, ill try it