Nvidia GF4 MX 440 wont work in Mandrake even with generic drivers
 

AMD xp 2400
machspeed v4mdpm
Nvidia GF4 MX 440
Dell E551c
Mandrake 10 official

Hello all,
I just built my first machine and am having mixed results with the Nvidia card. The box is up and running, working very well with windows XP pro and suSE 9.1 except no ethernet/internet with the suSE . Both of those OS's picked up the card off the bat. When Suse found the card on start up it prompted me to install the generic nvidia driver. This I did and no problems. And the card is fine under windoze. I have a problem though. My primary OS is mandrake 10 and I can not get the card to work at all. At first I had some X screen, although scrambled like eggs and the resolution was all messed. Now just a blank screen.

When I built the new machine I transfered my drives over. No big deal right. I had to reinstall XP as it is a "fragile" system and would not boot up. No big deal it was expected. I only use it for video editing anyway, so no loss. Mandrake and suSE booted fine except Mandrake would not recognize the VIA chips set on the on-board graphics card although suSE did. That prompted me to get this low-end NV card. Still no love on the Drake. Could the move have disturbed a sturdy OS like Mandrake? I doubt it. Darn it!

I really need to get Mandrake up and running. The suSE partition is only there for fooling around, in fact I only installed it a day or two before I built this custom box. So why won't Makdrake play nice with this NVIDIA card? I just want to get these lousy generic drivers to work and don't get why they wont. I thought perhaps it was a monitor/resolution problem. I played around with XFdrake and Xorgconfig, inserted the proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates for my crappy dell monitor. This seemingly only made things worse.

1. Do I need an NVIDIA-kernel to get the generic drivers to work with this card?
2. Without a graphical interface how can I download and install the official nvidia drivers if that is what it is going to take?
3. Could the move have loused up the system in such a way that I would have to reinstall? I really doubt this, I mean its not like its a windoze partition.

Hello!
According to my experience, Mandrake 10.0 is really "Dummy-proof". It boots and runs whatever you do to it, the only exception is that the Nvidia driver must be reinstalled whenever you do something unusual. So if you moved a HD with MDK 10 installed into a new machine, just reinstall the driver and everything will be just fine.

Thanks for responding,
The NVIDIA card is new, thus never had "official" drivers installed. It is my hope to get the generic NVIDIA drivers to work so that I will have an X environment to work with so that I can download and install the "official" NVIDIA drivers. At this point I am starring at a blank screen. Any help would be appreciated.

tsw

What do you mean by "blank screen"?
Don't you even have the command prompt?
If that is so, "reinstall" MDK 10. Boot from installation CD and select "install". Then use the option "use existing partitions", but don't let any partition to be formated! And don't change any RPM selections. Don't add any user, either, just proceed to the "configuration after installation" section and configure X server. It will take you not more than 10 minutes.

Thanks for responding,
I have use of consoles it is just screen 7 ( X server ) that remains blank. By running the command "XFdrake" from the console I believe that I have already preformed exactly what you suggest by running the install CD--or, will your idea somehow reset config files to where a person could make a fresh start. I'll try it, I mean what do I have to loose right? One more thing, would what you suggest be different than simply choosing "repair an existing installation". Thanks again.

I don't remember the option " repair an existing installation" I thing there are ony two options: "upgrade" and "install".
At least I allways noticed only these two.

Yeah, "upgrade" that is what I meant. Would that be different that the method that you suggested?

Yes, that would be different.
We are using forum for instant messaging, what is not very desirable.
Do you have a MSN address? If yes, email me your address to macbaren@volja.net and we shall discus it further on.

No MSN address sorry. I gave that a try and the results are the same--NO graphics! This sucks. That faux install rolled me back to Xfree86 from Xorg. I can only imagine how many dependencies that torked. I have KDE 3.2.3 installed and it depends on Xorg. Oh well. At final configuration the graphics part showed that the mandrake generic driver for NVIDIA was installed. I optioned to test the config. All check out fine. Then I rebooted and nothing. Does mandrake support this card? I really can't believe what a pain this is. Thanks for your help but it lools like I'll have to reinstall the root of my system and start from scratch. I am begging to wonder if that will even help.

Your card Works with MDK 10.0 for sure.

Clean install and the card works...kind of. And I believe the answer to my first question is yes, a person must have a NVidia kernel installed for the generic kernels to work. At least the mandrake installer went out of its way to install one.

The problem now, and it is just as frustrating, is that if I have two or more windows open and they over lap my system completely freezes. I totally loose control of everything: mouse, keyboard, you name it. This forces me to do a hard shut down which stinks.

Boy is this getting old. Might you have any suggestions as to why the system is now freezing. Again the card works fine under suSE and windows so it is Mandrake rather than the card.

thank you

Thanks to everyone who replied. This problem is resolved. It was entirely hardware related. The new motherboard that I installed had a short in it. Amazing what a little misdirected electricity can accomplish. The board was replaced and everything is working as it should.

tsw