Can anyone recommend a stable PCI video card for an IBM netvista (p3) running SuSE 9.2 pro ?
My onboard video card is going out... will this be a major pain in the a** to get installed and working ??? for a like me ?
thanks
cwolf78

I have a (p3) that works great with this;
http://www.xfree86.org/current/r128.html
But it uses AGP 4X/8X You could just get a cheap nvidia card.I got one at wal-mart for 50$

The netvista has a agp port on the mobo, so you can use either agp or pci. A cheap nvidia card is probably the best route. You can get a (PCI) Nvidia Riva/TNT2 M64 64mb for $10 or less from tigerdirect or newegg. I use these cards and have no trouble with them or the official Nvidia driver. If you get an agp card don't forget to activate the agp port in the bios.

To switch over should be easy,not sure about Suse and yast or saxt or whatever they use but for most you just edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and just change the driver (lets say its a nvidia card) under
# **********************************************************************
# Graphics device section
# **********************************************************************

Section "Device"
Identifier "leave the same"
Driver "nv"

Well my Netvista doesn't have an AGP slot so I think I will go with the (PCI) Nvidia Riva/TNT2 M64 64mb card... sounds like the best bet. Should I install it, plug the monitor into it and fire it up or install it and leave the monitor plugged into the current card and do some setup before plugging into new card ?
thanks!

Hey I looked on both newegg and tigerdirect and I could not find this card... do you happen to know if they are still selling that card anywhere else ? thanks!

The newest catalog for tigerdirect has the card for $9.99, I haven't actually looked on thier site for the card. I will look up the product number for you and post it later. My old netvista had a agp port, but come to think about it it was a 2.6 celeron so it may have been newer than yours. Sorry for the wrong info.

all good man... thanks for the input !

The SuSE video configuration program is called SaX. If you are in the console run /usr/sbin/sax2 as root.

Running 'sax2 -p' will give you a list of both the onboard and the added video card.

For example on a dell Latitude laptop:
# sax2 -p
Chip: 0 is -> ATI Radeon LY 01:00:0 0x1002 0x4c59 AGP radeon

So I could use the --chip 0 option. When you run it, you should have 2 lines. The 01:00:0 displayed is the PCI address, which you might use in your XF86config/Xorg.conf file. It goes in the Devices section to indicate which card you are referring to
BusID "PCI:1:00:0"
However, sax2 should generate this line for you.

There may be a bios setup option on whether to use the onboard video. You could turn this off after installing the video card.

Lastly, suppose that your display uses an non-standard resolution such as 1280x800. You could use the gtf command to generate a modeline, or the sax2 --vesa option.
For example: gtf 1280 800 60 -x on my computer yields
# 1280x800 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 49.68 kHz; pclk: 83.46 MHz
Modeline "1280x800_60.00" 83.46 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 -HSync +Vsync
This is just an example. Run the program yourself if you need to, and be careful not to exceed the hsync rate on the monitor.
The sax command would be
sax2 --vesa 1:1280x800@60
This is an example for card #1. ( The 1: part in front )

Can anyone find this card for sale new ?
Perhaps the post refers to a 16mb card... not 64mb ? On ebay they are AGP after 32mb and I didn't even see a 64mb...