Hey all. Of course, XFree86 does not work from the configurations. I have turned UseFVDev off and also have turned off something like DPMS. I can get Linux to work in VGA mode and in VESA, but when I use the nv drivers it doesn''t work. I have a PNY GeForce 4 Ti 4200. I would think that the drivers would work. Do I need to get the new NVIDIA drivers? I am doing this on Debian 3.0. It is kind of strange. VESA and VGA will work, but nv will not. Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong and what I can do about it? Thanks.

Hmm, "nv" should work, but I can''t tell you how to fix it.

To get the most out of your NVidia card in *nix you have to use the closed NVidia drivers. The newest drivers (4xxx series) suck, but the next-to-newest (3xxx series) are pretty good.

Debian has a package for them on the non-free server (nvidia-kernel-src and nvidia-glx-src). You can grab the next-to-newest from Debian''s testing repository (Debian also has an archive server, incase the 3xxx package is ever removed from testing). The instructions in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-*-src tell you all you need to know to set them up in a Debian-friendly manner.

What''s wrong with the 4xxx nvidia drivers? I''ve been using them on WinXP and Mandrake 9.0 and they work very nicely. Certainly work better than the ''nv'' drivers anyway. But then again I''ve had Linux for about a week, so what do I know!

I dunno if you''ve done this and i''m stating the obvious, or if i''m completely wrong, but you''re supposed to change the ''nv'' part to ''nvidia'' in your XF86Config file when you install the real nVidia drivers.

500x8!

quote: Original post by -Thork-
What's wrong with the 4xxx nvidia drivers?

The 3D acceleration is fine (as far as I could tell), but the 2D is broken.

quote: NVidia
The driver no longer uses the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA), but provides its own 2D acceleration architecture to better accomodate the needs of simultaneous 3D and 2D rendering.

And they did a poor job of making their own 2D acceleration code, I guess.

The 2D rendering is slow (if you run 'glxinfo', it improves a little for some reason, but the 2D performance isn't nearly as good as the 3xxx drivers; this matters a lot if you have a high resolution), it doesn't update the screen correctly (parts won't be redrawn when they should, and 'random' pixels will occasionally be drawn instead), et cetera.

This will probably improve later on.



[edited by - Null and Void on January 20, 2003 5:37:56 PM]

Thank you Null and Void, -Thork-, and BradDaBug for your input. So you would suggest I get the NVIDIA drivers? This stinks. During the installation whenever I tried to connect to the Debian servers it would not work. Strange. I will try and fix my connection and then I can download the new drivers. I have to get used to this filesystem though. So secure yet confusing. Windows just had Program Files and that is it. FHS is definitely better in the long run though. So I will try to get Linux internet working and then I can do this. Thank you. Any other reasons why you think it might be bad? Thank you for your consideration.

With out know how "its not working" its hard to say. Give us some error codes (full error out put log of X starting up would be nice).

yes I would use the drivers from nvidia. the closed source bothers me, but its better than no 3D acceleration =)

Ok, now I got my networking working. I downloaded the drivers through Lynx. The only problem is, I don''t know where Lynx saves files to! I looked for the files in some directories, did a find command, and looked at the man page, but none said anything about where lynx saves downloaded files! Can you tell me where lynx puts these? Thanks.

Lynx puts the files in the current working directory, if it''s not instructed to place them in another directory. If you ran it from your home directory, check there.

Thanks, Null. Ok, now I have the nvidia drivers, and I''m trying to compile NVIDIA_kernel_1.0-4191, but I get the following error when I say ''make install'':

In file include from nv.c:14:nv-linux.h:24: linux/modversions.h: no such file or directory 

I looked at the source for this, and nv.c is including nv-linux.h, which includes a header named (linux/)modversions.h, but it doesn''t exist. Do you know what I am doing wrong here? Is there something I''m missing? Thanks for your help!