I'm a raw newbie trying and trying again to get my head around Linux, but it seems I've chosen my bits of hardware poorly and am struggling. The solutions seem to be out there, but so far it's in a foreign language. I am running Fedora 3, which so far installed fine and recognised the motherboard's sound. Background: I have put together a new box using the following: * ASRock K8 Combo-z MBoard (ALi 1689 chipset) * Sempron 3100 processor * Geforce Ti4200 64MB graphics card * MSI Wireless card, PC54G2 * a single 80GB HD, a single stick of RAM (512MB) * Monitor: NEC Multisync C500 So far, I have installed the Nvidia driver. But that hasn't seemed to have made any difference. Testing with Tux racer, the game formerly ran barely faster than a frame per second. Now the game won't run. 2D games will run. Normally the game will say it is loading, but disappear. I suspect it is a graphics problem, but am not certain whether it might be a faulty card, buggered install of the driver, or that the AGP port on the motherboard isn't being recognised. Or something else entirely. I've been trying to install the motherboard chipset drivers but will get to that (don't know how to compile, or recompile the kernel). The Ethernet built onto the motherboard isn't being recognised, nor is the MSI wireless card. That has to be a driver issue as well (assumption). So there is no networking (can't connect to the router by cable or wireless, yet). The README instructions state "To install the driver,, you should reconfigure and recompile your linux kernel as follows..." which involves copying a file initially to the directory, /usr/src/linux-2.6.8/drivers/net/tulip/ which doesn't seem to exist. At http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/fedoracore3/ is states that " Fedora Core 3 no longer includes the kernel-source package. Users who want to rebuild the kernel are encourage to download the kernel-<version>.src.rpm source RPM, install it, and build kernel-source from it. However, if a user wants to build a module against the existing kernel, the entire kernel source tree is not required. Refer to the Release Notes for details on both these operations. " which explains to me why the directory isn't there. So, I'm looking for a very very very basic step by step guide to downloading and recompiling the kernel, and perhaps what to expect. The two drivers included with the ULi (ALi) chipsets include things for the Ethernet andULy SATA Linux SCSI driver. Should installing these drivers fix the graphics card problem, or are they entirely unrelated? (There is a warning at boot about I think AGPART which complains of an unsupported ALi chipset.). I'm sorry I don't know particularly what I'm doing, or even how to ask the right questions. (Somebody suggested last week trying Ubuntu for a simpler distro, while it seemed to install ok, it wouldn't run). ~Nick
