I´ve being using X with an xorg.conf which specifies vesa.

It works fine, but I have a GeForce4 420 Go card as my lspci dutifully tells me, and I want to know how to change xorg.conf to specify it properly.

The Slackware essentials book just talks about XF86 all the time, not x.org.

I tried changing the driver entry in xorg.conf to "nv" but it just hung, which is really horrible as I had to hard switch off. Truly appalling.

At least when I specified nvidia as the driver in xorg.conf it gave errors and returned me to command line. Phew! However it says that there´s no module for nvidia.

An easy thing to do would be to get the nvidia drivers and install, BUT lspci is reporting my card correctly! Doesn´t that mean they're already there?

Funnily enough the only reference to nvidia in my kernel (2.4.29) config is
CONFIG_AGP_NVIDIA=y

which is not much of a presence, but as I say lspci names the whole card very correctly.

So what's the story, are my nvidia drivers already active or not?

The card is recognized as a pci card, and shows up in lspci. lspci only shows that the "hardware" is present. (Gurus pls correct me if I'm wrong) But you have you manually install drivers for all nvidia cards. http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

what exactly do you mean ??

thanks akudewan, you're probably right, it's a hardware detection thing. A bit misleading, if I may say so.

Yes, I'll just fownload the drivers and stop faffing about.

the X config file for x.org is xorg.conf while for the separate xfree project it's XF86Config. The Slackware book talks about how the SuperProbe command is available in XFree, but I tested and X.org doesn't have that.

yep, verified, you need to install the nvidia run file. OK.
lsmod should then give you an nvidia entry.
For my xorg.conf I only changed the driver to "nvidia" and it all came good.

IT's funny that the xorg.conf file says it's been generated by XF86Config. Patrick seems to disable the XF86 references later. Whatever, there's a uge similarity between the two, but the name of the critical config files are different and that's crucial.

That's referring to the AGP port on nVidia nForce motherboard chipsets, not to nVidia graphics cards.
I don't think so... How else would someone know what hardware is in their system so they'd know what drivers to use? lspci does exactly what it should - list the pci devices it detects in the system, not the currently installed drivers.

guys wat would i choose in the link given above for nvidia drivers, IA32 or IA64? m using slack 10.2 and my card is read as vesa. but my card is GF2 400mx.. pls help.. thanks

2. after i download this driver. .where would i store /save it?

You've to use IA32 for 32 bits processors and IA64 for 64 bit processors, i'm pretty sure you've the first one, otherwise, you'd know about it

To install it, just follow the steps here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d..._1.0-7676.html

Btw, regarding your signature, asking already answered questions is not usually effective

gbonvehi.. yeah right so i placed "questions" only.. sorry coz actually m just a newbie in linux so im always in d process of double checking posted answers. .