Well you may already heard or read my post about Nvidia! And to make up for all the things i've said bad about them i though i would just make a post and explain why the drivers didnt work in the beginning of my whole linux journey!

Well it all start's in a little place called the bios. As you all may know the bios can either be your friend or enemy when it comes to linux!
why you may ask. well it starts like this. the bios can be your best friend when it comes to running cool hardware and disabling pnp (plug and play)
linux IS NOT a big fan of PNP. so in this case overclocking and make your system faster than usual make your bios a best friend.
but also a mean enemy why. because there are features in it that you may not be familiar with and disable them thinking that it would help your system out. but really i does not. lol

well now to tell you why the drivers did not work at all but first tell you the whole story and my hardships.

the fist time i installed linux i was excited and wowed at the things that i could accimplish with it. like hacking, tracking ip's, graphics, games, music. and so on. and to tell you the truth im big graphics freak so linux with my Nvidia card and linux i had heard of this amazing fps that linux could produce they told me that i could get atleast 20-30 fps back with linux. i said HELL YEAH and when and installed mandrake linux.

NO Luck with it. it told me something about not being to cimpile right and the rpms werent installing. so i whent to suse.

NO luck either the drivers installed and nvidia.o module was loaded but x kept on crashing.

Redhat 9 well to make it short Redhat in a a way rules, the way is confirues for me REDHAT IS ONLY FOR SERVERS because in my case REDHAT runs applications to DANM slow. dont know why.

so i installed the nvidia drivers and stuff i try to load the modules and redhat told me that i should assing the video card and IRQ turn out that my i had disable and irq for my video card. I firured AGP does need an IRQ does it. well i dont know all i know is that when i rebooted my pc loaded the nvidia module and started x WOW......

THE NVIDIA LOGO CAME ON AND WOW. 3D WAS MY FUTURE!

then since i hate redhat for being to danm slow i installed SuSE8.2 installed the distro and installed the drivers with out updating the kernel.... woopss
shoulnd have done that next time x started it started with the default drivers so no 3d i down load the drivers again in to find out that i can conpile them because my kernel header files dont match the kernel source. i was like no.....my 3d but i didnt give up the 3d world was to good to loose it. so i figured out how to compile the nvidia drivers with the current kernel although the driver would not load still because to the two different kernels on my system so i compiled to the newest one witch was 2.4.20-4GB-athlon. it worked but i still could not load the drivers so i told myself i've heard of this command that kicks ass and force loades drivers. so i insmod nvidia.o -f and voila startx and WOW......

the nvidia logo.

now my problem relied on how to load the driver on startup linux would not load them because the kernel headers did not match so i wento into.
/etc/init.d/ and pico the boot.local file and added this.

cd /
cd /module/kernel/2.4...........
insmod nvidia.o -f

wow it worked so if you guys need any help maybe i can help.. im no expert but i picked up pretty good pointers when it comes to this..


FearPasion710@comcast.net

If you are not happy with the speed of Red Hat, you should have tried Slackware. I runs alot faster for me and I find it eaisier to configure start up scripts and such than the other distros I tried.

Umm... yeah i've tried slackware and wow that distro is fast as crap. but there is even a faster one called Gentoo linux! Remember that gentoo is completely compiled from scrath for your system. witch make the whole process and applications run faster.

Hey, thanks for the help! I've been having the same problem and I think it'll solve it for me :-).