Hi, I have a WinFast K7NCR18G or K7NCR18B I am not in front of my computer I am at work at the moment anyways it has a Integrated AC97 soundcard and Integrated Nvidia GeForce 4MX equivalent. For starters it will not pick up my sound card.. Vector Dose but wont load GUI so I installed Peanut it worked with my Video Card but no sound.. and I also noticed it wasn't using all my video ram because it was REALLY jumpy on one of the games I opened that came with Peanut.. I have Redhat 8.0 here with me now that I am going to go home and install tonight but when I checked the Compatibility on Redhat.com it only had Geforce 2 MX..
can someone help??

I am not a Linux guru either..

Also i just found a link to some NVIDIA drivers http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html
would i download nForce Drivers Latest Version: 1.0-0248 for REDHAT 8.0?

ac97 codecs are handled by the intel 817 drivers I believe. As for video you diffinately want to grab those drivers. The newer version of the drivers have to be installed from a run level of 3 so you'll need to run 'init 3' and then execute the drivers. Once you've run the drivers you need to edit your XF86Config file to reflect the install of the Nividia drivers. Typically this file is located in /etc/X11/XF86Config. Under device change the line with 'nv' to say 'nvidia'. This will get hardware support running for ya and smooth out your game play. If the board is an NForce or NForce 2 based board, which it sounds like it is, then you will probably also want to grab the Linux NForce drivers from Nvidia.

Sorry what do you mean by this..
the rest i pretty much understand..
man i wish i was in front of my computer now to do all this..
well ill print this out once i get all the info..

The latest version of the nForce drivers is 1.0-0261. nVidia haven't update their "Linux/FreeBSD drivers" page in ages so the best way to find the latest driver revision is to go to the main drivers page and in the three boxes, selecting Platform/nForce drivers, Unified Driver, Linux and then clicking 'Go'.

Next, avoid the RPMs and go straight for the source tarballs, they're far more trouble than they're worth. When you have the source tarballs downloaded, uncompress them into /usr/src:



You don't want the audio driver as you'll either have ALSA already installed or be installing it later and the nvgart patch is probably useless as it'll have a heart attack when presented with RH's horribly raped kernels so just compile and install the network driver like so:



This is where it gets tricky. I haven't used RH in ages so I don't know whether it's still persisting with manually editing modules.conf or has joined the 21st century and is using modutils but somehow, the following line has to end up in modules.conf:



When that's done, modprobe nvnet and then run whatever tool RH usues to set up a LAN interface. That should get the onboard LAN going.

For sound, I suggest you look at the ALSA Project page for their intel8x0 driver (which also works on nForce2).

The IGP onboard video is supported through the same unified drivers as any other nVidia card so grab the latest by again going to the driver page but this time selecting Graphics Driver, GeForce and TNT and Linux IA32 before hitting go. Install them by following the instruction on the driver page but remember to open up your /etc/XF86Config file and changing the name of the driver from 'nv' to 'nvidia' or they won't work at all.

That should be enough to get your nForce board working at least partially on Linux.

I've never met a source tarball that I liked or that was less trouble than a simple rpm. Any way the drivers are no longer real rpm's but they are Nvidia's own installer. Unfortunately the installer wont run in an Xwindows session. It'll complain. So basically switch to super user(root) and run the 'init' command to switch to a non GUI mode suck as runlevel 3. So the command you need to run should look like 'init 3'. Most distros this needs to be run from the /sbin directiory. This will switch you to a command line only mode and allow you to run the install. You can edit your XF86Config from either a text mode or a an XWindows mode. Oh yeah from the command line still as root just type 'init 5' to get back to xwindows. Hope this makes sense. Either method should get the job done for you. Good luck with it!!!

Thanks guys i will try all this out tonight hopefully if i get time.ekk

nVidia's source tarballs are a simple make && make install affair with possibly some simple config file edits afterwards. Their RPMs were no end of trouble. On two seperate Linux distros (Mandrake, v8.2 IIRC and Red Hat 8) they (the graphics driver RPMs, back when they released them in that form) failed to install properly forcing me to go for the source tarballs which installed flawlessly. I've never wasted my time with their RPMs since. In fact, don't waste my time with RPM anymore period, it's far too much trouble than it's worth. Debian's apt and Gentoo's Portage systems are so far ahead of it (and you actually learn something about Linux while using them) it's not funny.