Hi Linuxites..

I am a newbie Linux user and have dual boot WinXP and RHEL-5 on my laptop, Compaq V3000 series. The problem is I neither have sound nor display drivers for it. While installation the RedHat installer detected the display and sound card but after that nothing.. I am an absolute newbie and have no idea on how to find and install these drivers. I have nvidia go graphics driver and conexant audio. Could you please help me in this regard. Also my RHEL only has Gnome no Kde. I want to install KDE how do I do that? It does not show in the Add/Remove software(?) in the graphical mode. I put the cd also but nothing happens. Please help...

Well, you have your share of problems. First of all, I would recommend in the future you post one problem per thread. It is very difficult to help you when the problems are unrelated. With that said, I will do what I can.

KDE can be installed. Red Hat uses rpm files to install packages. You can get the rpm's from the install media, or from online repo's. You have to configure what repos to use with most distros. I havn't used Red Hat since the split with Fedora. So I hope some one will chime in and provide some details.

O.K. so lets have a go at your sound. If your sound was detected on install, ( you indicated it was ) there is a good possibility all you need to do is launch a mixer program, un-mute the sound, or just turn it up. If that doesn't do it, then we need some information.

What sound card, or chip set do you have? To find out, open a konsole and run the command 'lspci' and post the results. That probably will show the sound card hardware. Also post the results of this command, 'lsmod | grep snd' You probably need to be root to get the commands to work. All commands without quotes.

As for Nvidia, I don't have any experience with Nvidia hardware. There are lots of posts on this board. You many want to read a few and see how to get the sofware installed.

To help you out, in windoze the hardware is supported with drivers. In linux, they are called kernel loadable modules, or KLM's for short. There are reasons for this distinction, I'm not sure I understand all the reasons behind the naming. It is also possible to re-compile the kernel to install the modules needed for your hardware. I don't recommend you try that for a while. The short message here is linux is different to windoze. It helps us help you if you use the correct terminology.

Hope this helps.

Hi Camorri

Thanks for your help.. Well my audio device is conexant and chipst Nvidia n630. And I dont think unmuting will help as when u click on the sound icon on the taskbar. it says "unable to load some module" or something to that effect.. I think some driver or as u refer to it KLM is required. I'll try the lspci command. anyother help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Salut

I need you to run the commands and cut and paste the results here. 'lspci' will list devices connected to the pci bus in your system. I need to see the results of 'lsmod | grep snd' also. There may be a KLM loaded, or there may not be. The way we proceed depends on what the output of those commands tells us.