NVidia GeForce Go 4200 (NV28) on Inspiron 8500 not supported

[jdwannam]

Sabayon Linux 3.4a on a Dell Inspiron 8500, 2GHz, 1GB RAM, 64MB NVidia Geforce 4200 Go AGP

From dmesg:

[ 50.239047] NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce4 4200 Go GPU installed in this system is
[ 50.239051] NVRM: supported through the NVIDIA 1.0-96xx Legacy drivers. Please
[ 50.239053] NVRM: visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
[ 50.239055] NVRM: information. The 100.14.11 NVIDIA driver will ignore
[ 50.239057] NVRM: this GPU. Continuing probe...
[ 50.239068] NVRM: No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!

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This is just an FYI post for those who may be wondering why they cannot use the 3D accelleration with the default configuration. Maybe we could have this driver listed as an option in the installer?

I'm sure this will be an easy fix but I didn't notice the message until I had searched unsuccessfully in the forums for a solution.

Duncan

PS: This card works out of the box on the popular debian based distro thats out there.

[WarraWarra]

The latest 100 version of nvidia driver does not have the part that makes pre nvidia 6000 serious cards to work or somthing like this.
You would need the 9755 or 9639 drivers to get your card to work.

as root in terminal :
# emerge -s nvidia
you are looking for the legacy " 1.0.7184-r91 "
# emerge nvidia-legacy-drivers
This should work for your video card then emerge -C nvidia-100.14.11-r11 to get rid of new driver.

There might be a easier way not sure. Legacy drivers was causing too much bugs = not default installed any more.

[jdwannam]

I was able to get the 3D acceleration working by downloading the driver from the link I posted above. Then, I decided to reinstall Sabayon again today with Gnome instead of KDE. (Using emerge to fetch and install the nvidia-legacy-drivers package) It appeared to work just fine but it did not make any changes to the xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver. I modified that section and I got the Nvidia logo when restarting X, however my max resolution was taken down to 1600x1200 and the compositing was still non-functional.

I'm sure I can get it to work if I fixed this manually. But I'm at work and this is my personal laptop, so taking time to troubleshoot what should be a simple problem on an experimental OS is low on the priorities.

Kudos to all of the other wonderful things in this distro. It still seems that the "legacy" nvidia driver package isn't functioning properly though.

Of course, this could be a PEBKAC or ID 10 T error since I'm completely new to Gentoo and emerge.

Duncan