On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 06:33, Greg Swallow wrote: > Did mention it before, the card is an Apollo Geforce FX 5200 with 128mb > DDR. Have twin boxes with 256mb RAM, Dual PII 266MHz, DTK mainboard, SB > Live! v5.1, node1 has 3 NIC (2 D-Link 530TX and 1 LinkSys LNE100TX), > node2 has 2 NIC (LinkSys LNE100TX). > > eth0 and eth1 are bond0 two connect the two boxes (192.168.2.0); going > for a Beowulf in the future. eth2 in node1 goes to network (192.168.1.0) > and internet. > > The nv driver works fine. That's why I got FC2. Was using Mandrake 9.0, > but would not see the nVidia even during install. Had Caldera (lost > cuase) before that. Have two iMacs in the SOHO running OS X > (FfreeBSD/Darwin) and this is why am considering FreeBSD for i686 > boaxes. > > Just trying to get a how to on building a kernel without rivafb. Greg, I know that it is to some extent an apples/oranges comparison, but I have a 64 Mb GEForce FX 5200 Go card in my Dell 5150 laptop. I don't know enough about the differences between the mobile and desktop versions of the chipsets to comment in detail, other than of course the Go series is a lower power implementation for laptop use. My brief review of the nVidia web site, at least from a high level review of some of the documents, suggests that basic functionality is similar between the regular and mobile versions of the 5200 series. I am using the stock FC2 kernel (2.6.6-1.435.2.3) without any recompiling and do not have any problems. As mentioned, I did get the rivafb warning during the building of the nVidia driver. It is certainly possible that there are video BIOS or other supporting chip differences between what I have and your card which may account for the problems that you are having. Of course, it is also conceivable that there is a bug in the new nVidia driver. I think that at this point, you may be best served by posting over at the nVidia Linux forums, where there are nVidia tech folks and users who participate and may have more technical insights into the issues that you are having. They may be able to suggest a possible resolution or confirm that there is a bug or compatibility issue in the driver. HTH, Marc Schwartz
