Video

Because NVidia's video driver is not open-source, most distros don't package the NVidia driver at all. It's up to the end user to download and install it. No problem, I've done this many times before with the installer available from NVidia's web site. This time, however, having had luck with Trae's instructions for the sound card, I thought I'd follow his instructions for video, too. From his site:

"In order to get nvidia drivers working on my Mom's Dell Inspiron 8200 using Ubuntu Linux, I had to do the following:

apt-get install nvidia-glx apt-get install nvidia-settings apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-(KERNEL)

then you want to:

nvidia-glx-config enable

Reboot, and that should work. (you may have to hand edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file to change it from nv to nvidia.

Good luck!"

After installing nvidia-glx and nvidia-settings, my system informed me that linux-restricted-modules-2.6.8.1-3-386 was already installed and the newest version. Good enough. Unfortunately, when I try to restart gdm (and X), it won't come back up. I don't know exactly what the problem is, but Trae's setup didn't exactly work for me. Back to the old-school, apt-less way, I guess.

After downloading NVidia's installer, running it, and letting it compile its own kernel module, it informed me that the NVidia driver would conflict with the rivafb module that the kernel was loading at startup. Still, I ran killall -HUP gdm and X came up using the nvidia driver (which I specified in /etc/X11/XFree86-4. Unfortunately, upon reboot, it still won't start X. Apparently, the NVidia installer is doing something behind the scenes that allows the driver to work right.