Hi: I have an NVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 board on a Pentium 4 machine. In a thread I started I received this post. In it, the following can be read:Should I infer that it is better to install the drivers provided by NVidia than just use the drivers that come with the Slackware discs?

If you are going to play games, sure.

Otherwise, the drivers with kernel should work OK.

Thank you. And if the OS is slackware 12.0?

it seems that your hardware is somewhat old?
and slackware is at version 14.1 these days. 12.0 outdated?

All the 12.x releases and older are EoL. You should probably back up your data and install 14.1. Slackware is not a "bloated" distribution and I ran 13.37, 14.0 and 14.1 on my old Pentium 4 system (RIP) with 1GB of RAM for years without issue.

For that old GPU, stick with the nouveau driver if it works ok. I can't recall if there is any legacy blob driver support for that GPU, or if you would need to be running an earlier xserver (as you are doing at present).

The fact is that every OS I install on that machine keeps hanging sometime after I enter the GUI. That is why I am trying with the NVidia drivers. I downloaded the slackbuilds scripts which compile and install the kernel modules. I am now about to test them.

For that card, one of these fine versions of the Nvidia driver should work for you... having 'enjoyed' the nouveau driver... it's many crashes and poor performance in even simple tasks.. i'd not recommend it's use for my worst enemy.

http://slackbuilds.org/result/?searc...legacy&sv=14.1

With that legacy NVIDIA card and the drivers you want to install you might want to stay with Slackware 14.0 which doesn't upgrade X11 past 1.12. Or with 14.1 you'll alternatively need to downgrade X11 to version 1.12. The NVIDIA driver for your card is version 96.43.23 and it is not supported with X11 higher than version 1.12. While Pat has released 14.1, the end-of-life for 14.0 is not known and it was released in 2012, so 5 years of support might happen as is the pattern with EOL versions to-date. BTW what is the rest of your configuration?

If you still decide to load the NVIDIA drivers, be sure to read up on how to install the NVIDIA driver, written in SlackDocs
http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:har...aphics_drivers
These steps will greatly help you with a successful install.

If you want to load the latest Slackware, I have a similiar NVIDIA card and found that the 14.1 with included NOUVEAU driver meets all my needs, including streaming video over a wireless link to my HD large TV screen. If you wish more information on the NOUVEAU then go to the freedesktop.org site and look at the NOUVEAU driver matrix for your card (it will be a NV18) you'll see all the features . Hope this helps you in your search for the right video driver.

As I have stated, the Nvidia adapter works fine in the VESA consoles, but fails miserably in the GUI. So, I took the card away and connected the monitor to the onboard video controller. The result was that there was flicker on the screen (maybe that's not the exact term). Worse, the BIOS hung.

So I think this is a hardware problem and, as this is no repairman forum, first thing I'll do is take the motherboard to a technician. This is really a second hand computer. A friend of mine gave it to me. I think the Nvidia adapter was placed there because the video controller was faulty.

NOTE: I have carefully read the motherboard manual, and the only relevant thing I found was the priority between AGP and PCI (that is, the on-board video controller) at boot, plus the aperture (size of main memory dedicated to video) which, as the values are the default ones set by the BIOS, can in no way cause faulty operation (provided everything else is OK).

I had quite forgotten I had made an alias of date. So, date was not really the date command but the alias. By the way, is there a way to make the system take, in this case, 'date' as the real command intead of the alias?

\date

4 members found this post helpful.

Learnt something new today :-)

Eric

+1 :-)