i have looked through a few of the tutorials but they seem to be for other distros, i not feeling confident about this at all. i have downloaded what i think is the correct driver, i have p4 1.7 gig celeron, 128 mb nvidia graphics card(this is what i downloaded NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-7667.tar.gz).
It sits awaiting deployment on my desktop, can someone plese talk me through it and keep it simple please.
ps if its any help if i type this at a terminal uname - r it gives me this (2.6.11-12mdk)

why should people be expected to explain this yet again? there are so so so many perfectly suiablte threads on here, and tutorials, please use one, and if you get stuck at a particular point, ask for specific help, thanks.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=30

this doc will be fine, other than it being /etc/X11/xorg.conf rather than /etx/X11/XF86Config-4 these days.

ok i downloaded the driver, i have read the tutorial, but don fully understand it. It says i have to shut down X now this may seem perfectly easy to someone who is familiar to linux but to me i haven even got a clue what X is let alone how to shut it down so thats my first hurdle. i did skip ahead a little and maneged to run the driver which tells me i still have x running, so once i shut down x i should be on my way

to temporarily quit x (until next boot or manual restart of xdm) just run "init 3" as root. log out and you'll not get the graphical login back up again. you will then be out of X.

i kust be nearly there now, i know how to install the driver, i know how to shut down x, i know how to edit the config file but i stuck.
what i dont know is when i shutdown x i left with command line saying charleshost or something like that, how do i change that to root?

charleshost.blah.blah.blah # logout
login: root
password: your root password

or if you don't want to log out, press ctrl+alt+f2 or f3 or f4 up to f8, I think. It'll take you to a different session and you'll be prompted to login as a different user. To run X again either type init 5 or startx...

X is the GUI you use, in case you haven't figured it out.

ok now i got the idea of changing from one user level to another, logging in and out. my next problem is when i exit x and login as root i then type in
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7667-pkg1.run and get not found, i realise that this is because i not telling it where the file is , but i not sure how to,the file is in file:/home/charles, so what do i need to type to locate it

You could just change to that directory and run it:

# cd /home/charles
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7667-pkg1.run

Either that, or just

# sh /home/charles/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7667-pkg1.run

Oh, and once you've shut down the X server, logged in as root, then changed directory to your user home directory (cd /home/charles or whatever you use), once you've run the script sh /home/charles/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7667-pkg1.run you may then find that it asks you a couple of questions, starts up and then just quits on you.

That is usually because you also need the kernel sources as well as the kernel i.e. the nvidia driver installer needs the kernel sources so it knows how to make the kernel module.

If you find that is the case, then just restart in graphic mode (init 5), login, open a terminal and issue the command which will tell you what kernel version you're running, then you go into the mandrake control centre (configure my computer) and into the software manager>rpmdrake+ and you look down the list of all packages to find kernel-sources that match the kernel version from the above command.

Once you've got them, you just follow the install instructions posted earlier and it should work fine - just for ease and speed, once the nvidia installer has finished doing its thing, it's usually easier to just modify the Xorg.conf with VI i.e. after the nvidia installer has finished, do (you may need to just make sure where the Xorg.conf is) but when it opens, use the arrow keys to scroll down to where you need to do the edit, then hit the insert button (you should see INSERT on the bottom of the screen), do the edit, then hit the Esc button, then enter :wq (colon wq) and hit enter. If you've done that right, you should be able to do init 5 and restartx, you'll know if you've got the nvidia driver installed as you'll see the nvidia splash screen.

regards

John

ty everyone for your patients in helping me with this, it a success i finally got it right and it works fine and now i know how to do at least one thing with linux !