Hello! I'm new to linux and have tried quite a few distros. Currently, I'm using Mandriva 2006, the free one.

The generic driver 'nv' for my Video card. It was working. But it doesn't seem to provide hardware acceleration (Games ran a bit slow). GL was crawling when trying to render stuffs. So, I tried installing the driver from NVIDIA (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8776-pkg1.run). Installation was successful. But when I tried to start-up X, errors occured. X said that NVIDIA driver was not able to find a specific module. Also, it said that screens were found but none of them was appropriate for the display

I have consulted a lot of help. almost all of them said that i should uninstall Mesa, which I did. However, none of them seemed to work.

BTW, the driver from NVIDIA specified above installed and worked sucessfully with my Redhat 9 installation. but i had the same problem: no hardware acceleration...

Can somebody please provide me with a solution...

The first thing I would try is installing the new nvidia driver, 1.0-9629, which you can get here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Next thing, make sure you've run all your updates. Mdv2006 shipped with a pretty buggy cvs version of xorg that was fixed in susequent updates.

Note, the 87** series of nvidia drivers had a lot of issues for me; you may be running into the same thing.

thanks for the reply kilgoretrout. you see, i have already tried the 9629 on my other linux box running RH9. It didn't work so I assumed it would also be the same for my Mandriva box... cross your fingers for me... i'm gonna give it a try...

BTW... do i have to make any modifications? ie, unstalling Mesa, editing xorg.conf, etc... and it would very nice if a detailed instructions would be given..

Mandriva 2006 Free (no updates applied)
Nvidia GeForce FX 5500