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Mandrake 8.1 issue...I CAN'T GET HELP ANYWHERE! PLEASE!

M

MournSanity

Diamond Member
I installed Linux Mandrake 8.1 agian today. I bought it a few months ago and it was a horrible decision. Every time I installed it I would get the same problem. Hopefully you guys can help me solve it.

The installation would go PERFECT and then I reboot the computer. When I start up madrake it gives me a nicle blue screen and starts loading up stuff. Then I get to a screen with an ascii penguin picture with the word LINUX really big at the top. The page has my processer info and my ram count. But the problem is that this screen starts to flicker...A lot. The it says something like "id x respawning too fast. Will try again in 5 minutes."

What the heck is happening. I can;t get the the GUI or anything. I am a complete Linux newbie so I don't know what to do. Every time I installed it I got the same problem. I can't even use the OS. It was a waste of $40 if I can;t get this problem solved.

Please help me.
 
while its flickering, hit ctrl-alt-F1 and you should be at a CLI login.... then fix the drivers like noc said... instructions are are nvidias website and easy to follow
 
Um...I found the driver page but...There are like 4 different drivers for Mandrake 8.1. Which do I use?

Also, where can I find the instructions on fixing it? Can you link it to me...

<--- Idiot.
 
Wait a sec, I'm confused. How exactly am I supposed to install the drivers? Do i copy them to a floppy disk or something...

...This is all so confusing...
 
Originally posted by: hypersonic5
Wait a sec, I'm confused. How exactly am I supposed to install the drivers? Do i copy them to a floppy disk or something...

...This is all so confusing...
Click to expand...

Get them onto the linux machine (by floppy, network, cdr, manually type in every line of code, etc). Follow the instructions for the type of file you download.
 
Ok, I tried it about 5 times and still can;t get it to work. Those "easy to understand" instruction are useless for me because I am a Linux idiot. I don;t know what the hell to do. I pressed ctrl+alt+f1 and it brought me to the console or whatever but I don't know what to type from there. I tried the stuff from the nvidia faq but it didn't work. I don't know how to get it to read off the cd.

Please, I AM A LINUX NEWBIE. Explain this stuff to me in a way I can understand.

Thanks much,

~hyper
 
Please, I AM A LINUX NEWBIE. Explain this stuff to me in a way I can understand.
Click to expand...

Time for...

Lesson #1: RTFM. Even if someone had the time and inclination to give a step by step description, it would probably be different on their machine than yours. Hence, you need to do some reading and figure out what the heck you're doing.

Lesson #2: Start small. Installing the NVidia driver may not be the greatest place to start - it involves package management, editing config files, some knowledge of X configuration and logs, etc, etc. The two basic things you'll need to know to have any clue about what the readme says are how to install packages with RPM's and how to edit a text file using the editor of your choice - I'm guessing that Emacs is standard on Mandrake. If you read some (not all) of those two pages, things won't seem quite as bizarre.

Lesson #3: Love the man pages. Try "man mount" and maybe "man fstab" to learn about reading off a CD. I'm guessing that "mount /mnt/cdrom" should be enough but, as usual, that depends on how your system is set up.


Last, purely personal opinion: Never call yourself an idiot. It implies that you don't have the capability to do or figure out things yourself, which makes people less likely to spend their time helping you. Newbie is fine... everybody was a newbie at some point.

Check out the docs I mentioned to get yourself oriented. Then you'll be able to give more useful info in your posts, which means more people will help, and with more relevant and specific info. You'll probably still have some trouble getting X configured right, but many people around here have done that, and it's less system-specific than the other stuff.




 
You know what? F*** Mandrake 8.1. Does the newer version(8.2 I think?) have Ti200 drivers from the get go? I'd rather get a new distro instead of messing with this. How about SuSE? Is there a distro that is totally compatable with my stuff? This is just way to bothersome for me.

I'm gonna go do my homework....
 
ctrl-alt-f1 will bring you to a virtual terminal. At this terminal, you can login using the username and password you setup previously. The password will not echo anything to the screen so if there is a cursor, it will not move. That is how this is supposed to work, its not a bug 😉

I will assume you can do this much. 🙂

Once you have loged in, type:

su -

This will ask you for the root password that you set during the installation. Enter that password. You should now be root and see a # (hash) as your prompt.

I will base the rest of the instructions on you having the files on cd (since I believe that is what you said you did).

To mount the cdrom you must first know what it is.

ls /dev/cdrom

If this command returns something along the lines of cdrom you are fine. If not, you will have to figure out which device your cdrom is. hdc is the master IDE device on the secondary IDE controller. That will be important if the file /dev/cdrom does not exist. But Im not sure where to go with that, I would have to play around with it for a minute, so I will assume /dev/cdrom exists (since this is mandrake and all).

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt

This should mount your cdrom in /mnt. The -t iso9660 specifies the file system on the cdrom and may be wrong. OpenBSD uses cd9660 I believe, and I think Linux uses iso9660, but I could have them reversed. 😛

cd /mnt

This changes you to the directory of /mnt.

ls

This lists what is in that directory (and Mozilla is ascting wierd for me at this point 🙁)

cp *.gz ~/

This copies *.gzx (anything that ends in .gz) to your home directory. ~/ is a shortcut for your home directory. in this instance use /home/your_login. The fact you su-'d to root may complicate the ~/, so using the full path would be preferable. But knowing the ~/ shortcut is nice and I will be using it throughout the rest of the document to mean /home/your_login 🙂

cd ~/

tar -zvxf NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2960.tar.gz

These commands first change your working directory to /home/your_login and then "untar and decompress" the GLX file. The tar command, or Tape ARchive, groups files together under one name, much like .zip files are often multiple files in an archive, but tar does not compress the files. The -z flag used in the tar command gunzips the files. The .gz extension at the end of the file means it has been gzipped. Read the tar manpage for more information on the other flags. 🙂

tar -zvxf NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.tar.gz

You should have an idea of what this does from the previous description.

cd NVIDIA_kernel
make install

This should install everything important there.

cd ../NVIDIA_GLX
make install

This should install everything important there.

Now that all of this is installed, we move on. 🙂

As root:

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

This will bring you into an editor (vi) to edit the XF86Config-4 file. If this file does not exist, try:

vi /etc/X11/XF86Config

🙂

Now, in vi type:

/nv

And hit enter. This searches for "nv". You should see soemthing like Driver "nv". We will need to change this.

type: 2 x

This will delete 2 characters (n and v). Now hit i. This will bring you into the editor mode.

Type: nvidia and hit escape.

The line should now read: Driver "nvidia"

Now, type: /glx

If there is no entry for glx, add Load "glx" into the Modules section. Also remove Load "dri" and Load "GLcore". Ill leave the specifics of these steps up to the user to figure out 😉

Now reboot and see what happens.
 
Originally posted by: hypersonic5
You know what? F*** Mandrake 8.1. Does the newer version(8.2 I think?) have Ti200 drivers from the get go? I'd rather get a new distro instead of messing with this. How about SuSE? Is there a distro that is totally compatable with my stuff? This is just way to bothersome for me.

I'm gonna go do my homework....
Click to expand...

Since nVidia doesnt play nice, only retail versions will carry this stuff. The directions I gave should prove simple enough for an ignorant user to follow, while providing a little education and a chance to think 🙂

Good luck.
 
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