GeForce FX 5900 and Mint

[hotweiss]

I've been trying to install a driver on Mint for my GeForce FX 5900 video card. I'm running the latest version of mint and wondering do I need to go to an older version of Mint for a driver to work for my card?

The problem when I am trying to install NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.12-pkg1.run is there is no kernel for it. The system tries to find one from the internet and that doesn't work, and then tries to build one and that doesn't work.

Any ideas would be helpful, thanks.

Try these drivers:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_disp ... 80.22.html

1.

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sudo apt-get remove nvidia*

2. Ctrl-Alt-F1

3.

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sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

4. sudo sh ./NVIDIA.....

5.

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sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

[hotweiss]

Thankyou for replying so quickly hotweiss

Well, I have been going through the process as described in the steps. I tried the different driver as suggested, but got the reply "The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 GPU installed in this system is supported through the NVIDIA 173.14.xx legacy Linux graphics drivers. Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more information. The 180.22 NVIDIA Linux graphics driver will ignore this GPU." At that link I found confirmation that my specific hardware matches up with the specific 173.14.12 driver that I was trying before.

So now I know the problem has something to do with finding the kernel and installing it from the internet or building it, neither of which Mint has been able to do. Does anyone know why?

Ok, you probably need the kernel headers then:

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sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

[hotweiss]

I tried that and found I did have some outdated headers.

Now with new headers, I tried installing again and found again the ERROR: Unable to connect to download.nvidia.com [unknown host] and then it attempted to build its own kernel and got the ERROR: Unable to build the NVIDIA Kernel module.

Don't worry about the NVIDIA connection, just let the driver compile everything by itself.