nVidia GeForce 4 MX420 (SuSe Install Problem)

[fuelcritical]

Hello and thanks for reading this.
I am attempting to install SuSE and am having trouble with my
GeForce4 MX420 card. After First CD installs and I pick GeForce
as primary card(only card) it reboots....then when it comes up the screen
goes hay wire!!
Is the only hope to use two graphics cards...older 2D card and this one
or does someone here know a trick???
Thank you in advance.

[bwkaz]

You use the "vesa" drivers during installation, however it is that you choose that. Then, you get the real, working Linux drivers from www.nvidia.com and install them.

The reason it doesn't work is that the open-source "nv" XFree86 driver doesn't work with anything newer than a GeForce 3 card. The "vesa" driver works with any VESA-compatible card, which is all of them, AFAIK. The nVidia binary driver (the one you'll get from www.nvidia.com) works with all nVidia video cards except very old Riva TNT chips.

Good luck. Make sure you read the README at nVidia's site before you do anything, though. Running the NVchooser script can also help.

[fuelcritical]

Yess...that did it...thanks a lot. I Have just partitioned my hardrive for dual boot win2000 and Linux. Great Help!

[bwkaz]

Cool, glad it worked for you. :)

[K'hatarlan]

What version of SuSE were you using?

I've been trying to get SuSE 7.1 to play nicely with my MSI Geforce4 Ti 4600, with no luck.

Neither SaX or SaX2 will allow me to set up even VESA drivers.

SuSE says in their nvidia-installer-HOWTO that they support the nvidia driver for 7.1. However, every time I try to rebuild the system complains that it can't find nvidia.o on the link.

Any ideas or pointers?

K'hat

[DarkJedi9]

Originally posted by bwkaz
The reason it doesn't work is that the open-source "nv" XFree86 driver doesn't work with anything newer than a GeForce 3 card...

Really? Oh, crap. I guess they didn't work for my GeForce 4 then... :) I don't know where you heard that, but back (way back) when I was in Slack and didn't yet know how to compile a kernel, thus nvidia drivers were failing the cc sanity check, I used the "nv" driver rather successfully. 3D was no shining wonder, but the card was functional.

[bwkaz]

It does work now with XFree86 4.3.0, but at the time I posted that (notice the date on my post? Dec. 11, 2002 -- before the release of X 4.3.0 (that version was released the end of Feb., 2003)?), the "nv" driver only worked with GF3 and older cards.

Go to http://www.xfree86.org/4.2.0/Status22.html#22 for "where I heard that from". It's the XFree86 4.2.0 driver status page for nVidia cards. If you replace 4.2.0 with 4.3.0 in the URL, you can probably find the 4.3.0 driver status document. You may have to delete the 22 and #22, though, and pick NVIDIA manually.

[DarkJedi9]

Originally posted by bwkaz
It does work now with XFree86 4.3.0, but at the time I posted that (notice the date on my post? Dec. 11, 2002 -- before the release of X 4.3.0 (that version was released the end of Feb., 2003)?), the "nv" driver only worked with GF3 and older cards.

Go to http://www.xfree86.org/4.2.0/Status22.html#22 for "where I heard that from". It's the XFree86 4.2.0 driver status page for nVidia cards. If you replace 4.2.0 with 4.3.0 in the URL, you can probably find the 4.3.0 driver status document. You may have to delete the 22 and #22, though, and pick NVIDIA manually.

Oops :( didn't notice the date; assumed it was a relatively recent post. My b.

[bwkaz]

No problem, doesn't really matter to me. :)