[Centos] nVIDIA on CentOS 3.3

Christopher Blume godsmoke at godsmoke.com
Wed Sep 22 03:17:26 UTC 2004


Hello Rick,

I have to say, I found your notice of nVidia cards "not working" as a 
little odd.  To begin with -- drivers *generally* do not vary between 
distributions of linux.  So, the fact that your card "doesn't work" with 
CentOS means that something else went wrong -- not that the drivers 
don't exist, or don't function properly.

First of all, I'd be interested to see where your conclusion that your 
monitor doesn't work with an nVidia card in linux came from -- what 
exactly did you experience/test to come to this statement?

I don't know anything about Kudzu, but, let me tell you, the nVidia Riva 
TNT 2 is ABSOLUTELY supported by the linux kernel -- and XFree86 
ABSOLUTELY runs on it.  If it's not working on your system, instead of 
making conclusions about Linux as a whole, understand that there are 
probably issues with the configuration files you either manually wrote, 
or the programs CentOS/RHEL bundles with the distro did.

nVidia cards have the absolute best support under linux of any video 
card -- and I highly doubt what you experienced was a driver issue -- if 
it was, it was because of some mangled patch that RedHat applied, 
because the driver for nVidia TNTs is used by tens of thousands of Linux 
users.

Thank You,
Christopher Blume

Rick Graves wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I tried it.  The short answer is that nVIDIA cards are
> OK for text, but may not work at all under X.  
> 
> I downloaded the 3.3 ISO's, and burned new CD's.  I
> did an X desktop install on a test bench P3 600 MHz
> system with a 4.3 gig drive.  I did the install with a
> known-to-work Voodoo Banshee card to get the system
> going.  I used a Mag DX1495 monitor, which I know does
> not to work on Linux with nVIDIA cards (but which
> works just fine running Windows with nVIDIA cards).  
> 
> Everything installed OK with only a minor glitch
> toward the end (just when going into the reboot, after
> setting up the monitor and display card, there were
> some messages about cannot find some graphics files). 
> 
> 
> After going into my regular user account and adjusting
> some preferences, I shut the system down, replaced the
> Voodoo Banshee card with an nVIDIA Riva TNT 2 card,
> and restarted the computer.  During startup, kudzu
> detected the hardware change, and configured the
> machine for the new card following my confirmation. 
> (Windows can do this automatically, why not Linux?)
> 
> Sure enough, when X tried to load, the screen went
> blank.  Not only did the screen go blank for the X
> console #7, but the screen was blank for the 6 other
> consoles as well.  I knew this because I could change
> to my favorite with F2, then Ctl-Alt-del to reboot. 
> The screen stayed blank until the computer began the
> new boot, when the screen came back.  
> 
> This was exactly the situation under CentOS 3.1.  
> 
> Moral of the nVIDIA story: if the monitor/display
> card/motherboard combination works for you, great.  If
> not, using a display card from a different
> manufacturer may be the best solution.
> 
> IMHO.
> 
> Rick



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