Hi. I had a lot of trouble installing the NVIDIA driver and I finally now have it working (thank god). My question for today is, is there anything else to it besides the driver? In windows you get an advanced menu pane with all kinds of extra options.

If anyone out there who's installed the drivers knows if there's anything like that in linux, I would appreciate word from you

Thanks

Check the documentation for it on the nvidia website.
There are many options you can set.

Alright, don't give me an easy way... ah I forgive you

My next question is then, how do you konw if it's working properly?

When x starts you will see a white screen with NVIDIA in the middle. If you see that it's loading.

If you need more help let me know. I'll point you to the how to I wrote.

Hope this helps. Are a bear for a newbie huh?

Yeah, I've been using linux for... two weeks almost. i think

I've actually found most stuff really easy. I'm sort of impatient with some things and I take the quickest shortcut possible. Usually half of my posts are problems that I solve myself before getting a response. But it's worth a try to get it up and running faster

By the way, I hate reading manuals. I'll avoid that at all costs too

Oh, I do see the NVidia screen at the beginning. I was wondering if there was any reason you could see that and it was stilll not running and if there was a screen or a command that would tell you for sure it was working.

One of the FAQ's on the NVidia site talked about the nvidia driver not working unless he typed in "modprobe nvidia" everytime he started up. That's why I was wondering

that was probably my post on the nvidia site you saw, but my case appears to be rather unique.

To see if the nvidia drivers are working correctly is simple.

Try running TuxRacer.

Or, check your /var/log/XF86log (XFree86 logfile).
You should see a few lines (probably with (II) in front of it) that refer to your NVIDIA driers being loaded, modes, agp size, mem size, etc...

You can also run lsmod, and see if the module is loaded there

dmesg might be handy here too.

Run an OpenGL game. If it runs, you should be set.
glxgears?

You might want to learn to love your manuals, especially in linux. You might be surprised at the number of answers to your questions that appear in manuals.

There is no nvidia tweaker that i can think of that is a gui for linux like you had in windows. The README file (which, not technically being a manual, you might want to read) included with the drivers have a long list of options explained to them at the bottom in the appendix. I happen to be reading this now in an attempt to get my fx card to run in 4x agp.

Check it out, and let us know how you do!

Could look in the logs. Goto Mandrake Control Center then click System and Logdrake thing. I usually put in "fail" and put a check for just todays error. Also click syslog etc on the left. Click search. Anything that fails will showup. I had problems with agpgart and such but it works now.

Hope that helps.

yeah man i read anything I can get my hands on regarding linux.
It has allowed me to race thru all the easy stuff and having an index to flick thru is sometimes really really handy. Between myself and the roomie we have about 15-20 Linux/Unix books for reference and casual reading [granted most of the books are his heh heh heh].

Ok ok, I found all the NVidia options after reading through the manual. You're right, no real tweaking options. Most of the things that I want set were auto-detected when I looked in my XF86Config log file. The only last thing I want to configure is using it with my television (especially twin view). I found it in the instructions I just have to read through it.

Now that I have everything running properly (OS, joystick, sound card, video card), I just need to find some good games. Any suggestions?

yeah UT2003, Quake/Urban Terror, Castle Wolfenstein and there are a bunch of others also natively run on linux.

and a big hurrah for id software, makin sure penguins can still frag!

you can try some of the games that came with the OS such as Tuxracer.

I agree pld - fair play to them.

i'll try tuxracer, it's hard to buy linux games around here, so i'm looking for something i can download

Well the games are all ordinary boxed version although they don't tell you there are linux versions hiding away inside the box.

SO if you get reatail version Unreal Tournament 2003 for example - you can install the linux version [although you have to do a jig with the cd swapping to get it installed].