Hi,

after spending a couple of weeks triying to get an unwilling nvidia card (GEForce4 MX440) to do some HW acceleration and the sound card (SiS7012) to work at all I've gaine some success - but it's far from how it should be.
Could anyone help me on the following questions?

1) The nvidia card does ony work if I set 'nvagp = 0' in XF86Config. All else fails and causes the X server to crach alongside with the rest of the system. The only trace in the logs (as far as I can find) is the dry remark 'agp not started' in the XFree logs.
But after all - the card IS 8xAGP - is there any way to get this feature going at all under Linux?

2) After I discovered that the ALSA drivers didn't compile as they shoud (error messages that the compiler was a different version than the one used to compile the kernel with) I built a new kernel from the original Suse 2.4.20 kernel source. This time, I could compile the Alsa (0.9.8) driver and Hurray! I have some sound: but the sound system is very unstable, needs frequent restarts and generates a log of warnings in the boot.msg like:

Module snd loaded, with warnings
Module snd-seq-device loaded, with warnings
Module snd-rawmidi loaded, with warnings
Module snd-mpu401-uart loaded, with warnings
Module snd-page-alloc loaded, with warnings
Module snd-ac97-codec loaded, with warnings
etcetera ...

Couldn't it be that the sound support from the kernel conflicts with the ALSA drivers added later?
Any idea where to continue the quest???

3) Perhabs a crazy idea, but could't it be that kernel version 2.4.22 supports my hardware better than 2.4.20? It is, after all, a very new box (1 month old).
If so, can I just take the .config from the old kernel and configure the 2.4.22 kernel with it? I already noticed there are some differences in the configuration menu ... like there is no longer an ALSA folder in it, to name one.
If not, does anyone have some hints about how to configure 2.4.22? Like, can I simply leave out all the HW support for things I do not have (like all the other video & sound cards, network cards etcetera etcetera in there)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Nvidia Drivers are compiled to work with certain distros..and certain binaries that come standard with the distro

If you are using a kernel which does not come standard with your 8.2 Distro chances are it will not work..

If 2.4.20 meets your needs, I wouldn't install 2.4.22..

But if you're like me and like to tweak things alot.. what you need to do is this

Try installing and running the non-distro specfic driver *if Nvidia has made one* . The installer should find your newly compiled kernel and make the appropriate custom tailored module for your kernel.

Have fun

Gary