Drivers?

[Swimkidd11]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 with an Intel Pentium 4 Mobile with a Nvidia GeForce2 Go. Could anyone give me software and or Fedora-Ported drivers for these devices? I am new to Linux, and I am not familiar with the way things work.

[Rubberman]

You would best get the Linux drivers from nVidia directly. You will have to install them without the xserver running - that would be runlevel 3. When you have downloaded the driver from the nVidia web site for your card and are ready to install it, let us know and we will help you through the installation process. I used to have a very similar Dell (gave it to my grandson) and use nVidia graphics hardware exclusively on my desktop, laptop, and netbook computers.

[Swimkidd11]

but the question is which nvidia driver is the right one? i also need help on installing ndiswrapper to help my linksys WPC54G ver. 2.0 Wi-Fi card. as you can see, i am very new to linux amd more specific: Fedora 14.

[jselover]

I use the rpmfusion (RPM Fusion - RPM Fusion) repository for nvidia drivers. They are packaged in rpms and you can add rpmfusion to yum, so the drivers are available in Add/Remove Software, and will automatically update along with kernel.

The web page explains it all. There are many other useful packages, too.
You will likely need either the kmod-nividia-96xx or kmod-nvidia-173xx rpms for that Gforce2.

ndiswrapper rpms disappeared from rpmfusion as of Fedora 14, I don't know why.
Good Luck

[Rubberman]

As I said, for best results, download and install the drivers directly from nVidia, and skip the ones on the repositories, including rpmforge (which I use for a lot of other stuff).

[coopstah13]

I definitely disagree that ones from nvidia are superior

i think for new users, it is much better to use the ones from the repo because they're auto updated, new users aren't going to know they need to recompile them at every kernel update

I've never had a problem with repo drivers in any distro i've used

[Rubberman]

I definitely disagree that ones from nvidia are superior

i think for new users, it is much better to use the ones from the repo because they're auto updated, new users aren't going to know they need to recompile them at every kernel update

I've never had a problem with repo drivers in any distro i've used

I wish I could say that coopstah. I've always had better luck with the drivers directly from nVidia. Oh well, at least we can agree to disagree on this! I think that we are in sync with most other stuff. In any case, I have an 8800GT on my CentOS 5.5 workstation, and an nVidia chipset in my Dell D630 Latitude. The proprietary (64-bit) driver direct from nVidia has always worked best there (workstation w/ dual HD displays), but I have to admit that I had to beat up on their engineering staff a bit to get some nasty video rendering and performance bugs fixed. That said, they were willing to converse with me, and did fix the problems, which haven't regressed for over a year now. On the laptop, I find that the ones in the Ubuntu repository are about the same as the ones downloaded from nVidia in performance and behavior. I run both 9.04 (32 bit) and 10.10 (64 bit) on that system, and either case seems to be ok to me. I am currently running the proprietary drivers, but since I haven't found much difference between those and the repository ones, I will probably reinstall the repository ones since I don't have to reinstall them when the kernel is updated. Not a problem now with 9.04 (no more updates), but it will be / has been with 10.10.

[Swimkidd11]

thank you for your help. it made my computer run much better, but there is one problem now, at startup, instead of the default "charge" splash, there is now three progress bars. i tried to use the plymouth-set-default-theme, but it never works. any suggestions?

[jselover]

Yes, that's the price we pay for getting more performance in X-Windows. The graphic boot screen provided by plymouth only works on nvidia cards with the native Linux nouveau driver. Once the nvidia driver is installed, the nouveau is disabled because the drivers conflict with each other.

That is why the boot screen reverts to text mode.

But I think a text boot screen is a small price to pay. After all, its not like we have boot our Linux systems often.

My two cents about the repo vs Nvidia driver source: If a person has the latest, greatest video card, the Nvidia drivers will likely work better, but for any 2 or more year card, the repo drivers will be just fine, and much less hassle.

[Swimkidd11]

i figured as much. it seems as if linux tries to pull off something like apple's "bonjour" even though it is very unstable. by the way, for whatever reason when i plug in my wireless card (linksys wpc54g ver. 1.2) it works fine for a bit, then i get a little black alert bubble that says "a kernel package has crashed" i think this is a result of a problem in xorg. do any of you think that installing ndiswrapper would help? if so, can you tell me the exact steps to install it on f14? thanks for all of your help