And I can't tell any differance. I let the system install the drivers-I didn't do anything. Should i find differant drivers?

Did you install the card with Mandriva as your OS? Try rebooting, the nVidia drivers will turn the nvidia splash screen on by default. If you see the screen your drivers are working right. There are some other commands you can use at the terminal to test your openGL as well.

that command should tell you either yes direct rendering is running, or no its not.

What difference were you expecting to see? Are you running games, editing photos, watching videos ... what? If you're just browsing the web then I don't think you could tell much difference between a $15 video card and a $500 one, no matter what drivers were loaded. I'm running an MX4000 card myself. IMHO this is a very good general purpose card for Linux. It's certainly not a high end gaming card though.

direct rendering: No
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

When I downloaded the driver off the Nvidia site and tried to install it--it said:


ERROR: You appear to be running an X server; please exit X before
installing. For further details, please see the chapter "Installing the NVIDIA Driver" in the README available on the Linux driver download page at www.nvidia.com.

how do i fix this?(This may be a dumb question--but what is a X server?)

X-Server is the program that lets you run KDE or Gnome. KDE and Gnome are just pretty front ends. When you install the drivers for you nVidia card you can't have X running, so you need to back out of your install into run level 2, or just the command prompt. KDE and Gnome are runlevel 5. To stop the X server press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, this should take you back to the command prompt.

So basicily you've installed your nVidia drivers wrong, you just need to re-install them correctly. nVidia provides directions on how to do this on thier site if I remember correctly.

This depends on the distro. Maybe you are specifically talking about the OP's distro, Mandriva, and you could be 100% correct on the runlevel 5 bit. I've never used Mandriva so I don't know what each runlevel is configured to.

On my Debian distro, runlevels 2 through 5 are all identically configured to multi-user mode with X, by default.

I didn't know it varied by distro. On my Gentoo and Slackware install run level 2 was the command prompt and run level 5 were the graphical interfaces. I'm assuming my Kubuntu install is like your debian, but I haven't dug deep enough into this one yet to see its true inner workings. Its not like Gentoo were you make the innards yourself. Which is good, because i've yet to build a working gentoo install :-(