nVidia

Well I got my repaired video card back from BFG Technologies today by courier. All I can say is wow, did they ever do a good job in repairing it, a brand new heat sink and fan combo with a metal shroud was put on it replacing the cheaply looking plastic fan that fell off it before. Also I got a free t-shirt from them.

After installing it and restarting Ubuntu it picked it up and worked perfectly. Now that I had a decent video card, a FX5500 256 MB, I decided to give the restricted drivers a try, what a mistake. After downloading them with apt-get and running the install of nvidia-xconfig i ended up with only 800x600 resolution and no acceleration. So I tried both the legacy and the new glx drivers along with the regular ones but they all gave the same result. So I then gave up and downloaded them directly from the nVidia website, the installer had me kill x by stopping gdm and then installing them, no precompiled binari3es were available so I had to build from sources which ultimately failed as when windows started up I had three desktop images overlapping on screen, thought the resolution was wrong so I checked and it was 800x600 @ 85 hz which my monitor can handle without trouble, so I even tested it on my 19" NEC to no avail.

The monitor was using the corrected drivers even, all the same the login screen loaded fine, never started getting multiple images until i logged in. So I turned the drivers off and went back to the way it was, good ole 1024x768 @75 hz and all is back the way it was.

Maybe I'll try them again later on after the next upgrade in 10 days to Hardy.

Good luck to anyone who does get them working, I bet it looks nice using them with compwiz.