I recently bought an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard and I downloaded the nforce drivers for Windows XP and Linux from nvidia.com (I'm running a dual-boot system). The Windows XP drivers installed without a hitch, but the Linux drivers are giving me severe problems.
I'm running the 2.6.0 kernel and nvidia apparently only has drivers for 2.4.x kernels. I can get the drivers to compile by linking /usr/src/linux to linux-2.4.22 source. However, this produces *.o modules and 2.6.0 requires *.ko modules. When I try to insmod (or modprobe) the modules I get an error saying "Invalid module format".
I found a patch on a Debian website (I lost the link, sorry) that was supposed to make the nvidia drivers work for 2.6.0 kernels. I applied the patch and recompiled the drivers and viola! There were the *.ko modules. However, insmod/modprobe still gave me the same error message when I tried to use them.
Is anyone else having this problem? I'm running Slackware-9.1 and just recently upgraded from linux-2.4.22 to linux-2.6.0 (about 2 weeks before I bought the motherboard). Is there something I'm missing? Is there a way to make 2.6.0 kernels load old 2.4.x modules? I would have expected to see tons of posts about this on the internet, but I can't find any that are relevant to my situation which makes me feel like I'm just missing something really stupid.
The module I'm really after is for the onboard 10/100 NIC which Windows XP's device manager reports as an nvidia MCP networking controller (NOT the Broadcom gigabit one. nvidia's drivers should create an nvnet.ko for this). if I cat /proc/pci in Linux, the information for the onboard NIC is some generic number. I think it's something like "Ethernet controller 1e00:d000" or something useless like that. At least if I got the NIC working then I could do some research on the onboard soundcard driver from within Linux
Thanks in advance for any help!
P.S. I'm not a linux newb (I've been using it since 1993), but I'm totally unfamiliar with the 2.6.0 kernel and I think that's where my downfall is here.