Putting a 16Mb NVIDIA video card in Debian "sarge"

[jamez1988]

I picked up a 16mb NVIDIA at a local computer store a an extremely heavy discount. I want to put it in my Debian "Sarge" computer. is there anything I should know before doing so? I have heard rumors that I'd have to download some sort of driver from the NVIDIA website. Is this true, or will it work with a driver built in to Debian?

[Icarus]

It will work with the generic "nv" driver which shipped with Xfree/Xorg

To get 3D Accelleration to work you need the drivers from nvidia

[teeitup]

I would make a backup of you XF86Config-4 file. It will contain usable settings for your monitor.
After putting in the new card you'll want to run, as root, dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86.
It will use the current settings as the defaults. Just change the parts pertaining to your new card.

There's a X config help link in my sig.

Good Luck,

[mrBen]

There is a great Debian-specific set of instructions for installing the nVidia drivers here (http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/Debian-nVidia/installation.html)

[jamez1988]

Thanks for the help.
I managed to get the card working in the normal 2d accelerated mode.
I can't get all the cool 3d stuff working because I can't coax the driver to compile correctly. Oh, well, maybe later.

update: maybe not...
I logged into XFCE as I normaly do, and started up Gaim, like I normaly do. I moved the mouse over a buddy on my list, but when the tooltip came up on it, everything froze. I got a hard lockup. Could not even switch to a diffrent TTY to unfreze things. I don't know if this is related to the new card or what. The normal tooltips on my toolbar worked fine, btw.

update again!
I logged back into XFCE and pulled up the settings window to disable tooltips. As soon as the window opened, I got another hard lockup. What's going on?!

[Icarus]

Check the log files in /var/log, mainly messages and Xfree86.0.log and look for errors or anything very odd

[jamez1988]

k, I checked the file, and at the very end of it there a a bunch of warnings about "font renderer for ".pcf" already regestered at priority 0"
This message was repeated 10 times, each time with a slightly diffrent thing replacing ".pcf". they are: .pcf.Z .pcf.gz .snf .snf.Z .snf.gz .bdf .bdf.Z .bdf.gz .pmf
I'll keep digging though the log and post anything else that seems likely.

update:
I found a bunch of errors near the top of the file that seem to fit with the error I found before.
(WW) The directory "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic" does not exist.
Entry deleted from font path.

there was the same error repeated for the font CID.
Then, the font path was set to "unix/:7100,usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc,usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"

It also skipped a bunch of libGLcore.a files because there were "No symbols found"

I'm sorry to give such brief discriptions of the errors, but I'm painfuly copying this down and typing it in by hand. :(