Installing New Video Card

[springshades]

My current video card has openGL, but the Linux drivers don't support it. For both work and play I'm going to need openGL support. I've got this old GeForce 4 MX 440 that I can throw in that should have support. My main question is what am I going to have to deal with in Mandrake? When I replaced a video card in a Fedora Core 2 computer everyone said it would just autodetect and use the correct drivers and it would be easy. It DID autodetect the drivers, but it was NOT easy. After it picked the new drivers X wouldnt start so I had to spend a couple of hours trying to figure out which configuration file I had to change and how I had to change it. For some reason X and the operating system don't seem to communicate very well. Am I going to have similar pain in Mandrake? Is there an easier way to do it?

[techieMoe]

My main question is what am I going to have to deal with in Mandrake?

Getting the OS to recognize it isn't the trick; getting 3D Accelerated drivers installed is the real challenge. Thankfully with Nvidia it isn't *that* difficult. You download the driver, install it, run a modprobe nvidia, change "nv" to "nvidia" in your XF86Config or Xorg.conf, restart X and you're good. (This is an obvious simplification. There are more steps than that, but there are also many many tutorials on it.)

For some reason X and the operating system don't seem to communicate very well.

That would be because the OS itself and X Windows were developed independently of one another. X Windows existed before Linux as a free replacement to CDE for UNIX. There have been recent efforts (on the part of the X.org group for instance) to bring X support up to par with other modern OSes, but work still needs to be done, I agree.

[dark_lord_kodd]

I swapped cards from ATI to Nvidia, everything was detected fine no probs.

Like techieMoe said, to get the openGL to work u will need the proper drivers from nVidia.

[springshades]

Thanks for the help. I had this idea to hit that option to have the xorg interface come up on the next boot. The OS should detect the card and that would let me make sure that X detects it correctly. It's pretty hard to download a driver from the nvidia website when you can't even start up a web browser.

[techieMoe]

It's pretty hard to download a driver from the nvidia website when you can't even start up a web browser.

Actually, links or lynx will connect to the Nvidia site from the console. They're a little difficult to navigate, but it works; I've done it before.