Hi, I am having serious trouble getting any new distros installed on my machine due to problems getting working drivers for my Nvidia Card. It seems to not like the generic drivers for it. Is there any way I can use the drivers that came with the card instead of the generic drivers on the distros I am trying to load?

Card is an Nvidia MX 4000 AGP 8x/4x 128MB

Distros I am trying to load, Simply Mepis 3.3.1, PCLINUXOS .92

Any suggestions will be much appreciated!

Thanks ahead of time!

Why dont u use the linux drivers supplied from nvidia.com ?

Okay, but then how do I install them on a new distro with no GUI?

Go to the nvidia site using a text browser such as lynx (or links) and navigate to the download section and download the right drivers for your system. You can also use wget to download if you know the url of the drivers. Once you have downloaded the drivers, do
Follow the instructions to install. If you computer is already in runlevel 5, make sure you do as root
before installing the driver (this stops the xserver). Also make sure you have gcc and the kernel source installed before attempting to install the driver. On Mandrake, you would use urpmi

I have never used a text based browser, so I need some instructions on that, as well as how to load it in text mode. Do you just type the name in?

su as root, then type links http://nvidia.com.
Some sites can be hard to navigate, but nVidia has taken this into consideration.

You use the up and down arrows to navigate from one link to another, right arrows follows the link, left arrow goes back.

Navigate to "Download Driver" and press the right arrow button. Then use the down arrow to "Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris Driver", press the right arrow button.

Then use the down arrow to get to Linux IA32 (if 32 bit) or Linux IA64 (if 64).
The driver is a link under each header, version is 1.0-7676, use the right arrow to follow that link.
Use the down arrow to navigate to "NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7676-pkg1.run" and follow that link.
When you follow that link, a grey box should open up with an option to Save, Open, Cancel. Default is Save, press enter. Then press enter again to download the .run file.
Once the download is done, press "q" and select yes to close links.

Then you should see the .run file, "chmod +x foo.run" (foo being the name of the file).
Then ./foo.run (to execute it), you'll accept the agreement, it may something about building a driver, choose yes.
When it's all said and done, no error, then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the driver to "nvidia".
Check the documentation in /usr/share/doc (IIRC) for further info.

GL,
-Jason

If you are getting text-only screen in PCLinuxOS, then the problem is NOT the nvidia drivers.

Log in as root and run XFdrake. You should when prompted select the nv driver for your nvidia card.

Once you can boot into a graphics screen, you need to use "Synaptic" in oder to install dkms-(version no)-nvidia. Use the older version for your card as it is quite an early one. This will pull in a dependency, nvidia-GLX-(version no).

That should install nvidia drivers for you.

hello Linusoids,
i`ve installed nvidia driver and things are goin just fine but i got to set some parameters there in SAX2 and i have suse 10.0 OSS.the parameters are as shown:

digitalvibrance
NvAGP*
cursorshadowXOFFset
ignoredisplaydevices
registrydword*
metamodes
secondmonitorhorizsync
vertrefresh*
stereo*
tvstandard
connectedmonitor*
connectedmonitors
twinvieworientation
cursorshadowalpha
cursorshadowoffset
videokey
secondmonitorvertrefresh
customEDID-TV-0
customEDID-TV-1
customEDID-crt-0*
customEDID-crt-1*
customEDID-dfp-0
flatpanelproperties
horizsync*
transparentindex
NVemulator*

(* indicates those which i feel are to be looked upon more)

i have AMD athalon 2400+,512 MB DDR ram,NVIDIA GeFORCE MX 400,5.1 sound card,ASUS A7V266 Motherboard,Samsung syncmaster 753s 17 inch monitor with 85Hz at 1024*768 support.
could anyone please help me set the parameters listed above so that i can get optimum and satisfying result from my graphics driver.