Hi,

Setting up a PC for someone and they wanted Mandriva installed but it has a 3dlabs wildcat 800 (beast of a card with 640Megs Ram!) graphics card with dual monitor setup.

I checked their site and it only lists some distributions like Red Hat and Suse. Would these possibly work in Mandriva or is there another location I can get 3dlabs drivers from that support Mandriva or even just compile them from source.

Cheers

So the drivers aren't part of the linux kernel, they're some kind of seperate patch to the kernel or something like that? If the drivers are part of the kernel, you should be able to get the support by enabling it in the kernel (which can be 'iffy' with an old card like that). At worst, you might have to install an old kernel and an old xfree-windowing system to get support for your card. I know, because I had an old card that I had to do that with -it eventually worked.

If you do think you'll have to resort to stuff like recompiling your kernel a milion times or even installing xfree, get ready for a big pain in the butt and a lot of work.

Support for that card isn't in the Linux Kernel. The drivers are closed source. Since it's a Realizm card you can install CentOS 3.9 and install the driver without a problem.

I've tried that and found the installation to be quite simple. You just have to run the program included in the driver package.

If Mandriva is necessary you could try it under there and see if it will install. Mandriva is pretty similar to Fedora, so it might work.

Just got an email about someone replying to this and it brought back some bad memories of trying to get this card working!

Was over a year ago but eventually I got them to go with Red Hat Enterprise and it worked fine, dual screen was a pain but all worked out in the end anyway...