[CS-FSLUG] Nvidia failures

[Ed Hurst]

<gripe mode>

Got together enough dough to purchase an nVidia MX 4000 (GeForce 4) for 
my system. Naturally, FreeBSD was fairly easy to update, and the special 
drivers were pretty easy to bring on-line. I get about 1400 FPS in the 
little glxgears display. Then I decided to test my Linux harddrive.

CentOS was a little unstable at this point, so I tried SUSE 10.0, which 
was supposed to have the driver already in the kernel. No dice. It 
froze. SUSE 9.3 simply refused to use the new driver. I ended up running 
in framebuffer mode. Several Debian derivatives all showed one 
consistent major stupidity: they all resolutely refused to import the 
home partition as /home, so it didn't matter if they could run the card. 
I suppose I could have eventually worked it out manually, but that's not 
the point. I shouldn't have to do that; installers have come too far for 
that. Except Kubuntu, which refused to even give me an X server.

Those are pretty much the distros I'm willing to use right now. Whatever 
the problem is, Linux is just not able to run properly on this hardware. 
I'm sure there's something about HPs and PCI video cards, etc. Yes, I 
most certainly did follow the instructions in each case. I'll be waiting 
for something better in the future.

</gripe mode>

(Hint: "gripe mode" means I'm not seeking advice, just ranting.)

-- 
Ed Hurst
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