nvidia is perhaps not the best choice of graphics card if you want to use Linux, try intel they seem to work most closely with Debian comes to development.

Fred.

Please back up that statement with facts.

The GeForce FX 5200 is problematic in some systems. Not all, and it depends on the situation.

1. The only real driver support it is going to have is through Nouveau (the free xorg drivers).

2. There are drivers for the GeForce FX 5200 (the 173.14.39 drivers), but they only support xorg-server-1.15. If your distribution still has this, then you're in luck.

Nouveau is improving so you have to give it a chance. Things like OpenCL support are being added and Mesa is very expansive to incorporate these features. You can get s3tc support if your distribution has a package for libtxc_dxtn, and driconf is a fairly decent control panel. Each new release gets better, so given time, it will improve.

You have to remember that Mesa is not the same as Nvidia's OpenGL implementation. It's similar, but not exactly as some apps work fine with Mesa, but not all apps.

For an exact distribution, it will depend so do research. Nouveau works fairly good, but yes, the Nvidia driver is better in some regards. It might be worth your effort to research distributions that offer older versions with support.

Why do you assume this is desired? Why do you assume we want a community that is made up of click and drool types? Why do you think you have to be an engineer to do or understand anything that is said in this old thread?

This is a very uneducated statement.

ReaperX7,
yes use Nouveau, if you can. Intel nor any other commercial provider will not produce drivers for old hardware.

Fred.