What is the best video card for Linux?

[biscuitlover]

I finished installing mandrake 7 and everything seemed fine until I rebooted the system. I see a blue screen with a penguin come on and all off a sudden the screen goes crazy. It has to be the graphics card (I think). I am using a geforce 2 (hercules 32mb). My question is what video card is completely compatible with Linux and offers the best performance. I know that the old school cards will run linux great, but I want a little performance. I have heard that the voodoo3 agp is compatible with linux. is this true?

 

[FOBSIDE]

i have a voodoo 3 3000 agp card and its supported just fine. the voodoo cards are generally well supported by linux. kinda sucks that you always have to be a step behind in hardware just cuz linux doesnt support it yet.

 

[Sunner]

Any nVidia card.
nVidia have their own official Linux drivers, and their performance is definately comparable to that of their windows drivers.

There was a site that did a comparison in Q3 with Linux vs Windows, it was a toss up with a GeForce DDR, with windows winning sometimes and Linux sometimes, but the differences were so small that it was well within the marigin of error.

 

[biscuitlover]

Sunner Maybe Nvidia cards are all compatible, but I can't get mine to work with even mandrake. My friend had to do procedures to get his geforce 2 card to work with linux. I want a card that is compatible (meaning all I have to do is install linux without having to worry about anything). Fobside it does kind of suck that you have to tone down your hardware for linux, but it's worth it. Linux rocks.

 

[Sunner]

Strange, I have a GF DDR, and it works like a charm under RedHat.
XConfigurator found it and I didnt have a single problem during the setup procedure.

And a guy here at work is using an Asus V7700 32 MB, which is pretty much identical to yours, and the story is the same for him, you sure its the vid card crapping out?

 

[jtshaw]

There are instructions on the Mandrake Web Site that explain how you need to install the drivers in Mandrake for nVidia cards, personally I have installed the nVidia drives for my TNT2 and I found it was easy, only took about 5 minutes. If you can't deal with having to do some configuring on your own then you shouldn't be using linux now. It is a very powerful os and it is thousands of times more configurable then windows but you have to be willing to learn how the os works in order to get things done.

 

[Priit]

biscuitlover: Nice to hear that You have the right attitude to linux (I know people who saying that linux is sh*t only because their fancy Ati Rage Pro MAXX video card isn't supported). I don't know about GF2, but I got my TnT running with 30 sec (RH 6.2, Kudzu recognized the card and launched the Xconfigurator. Even the restart wasn't needed ). Try downloading the drivers form Nvidia's site and do exactly what the manual says. It's a bit hard for newbie, but really worth of trouble. No need for Winblows just for playing Quake any more

 

[biscuitlover]

Thanks for everyones opinion. I will try to get my geforce 2 card running with linux. Even if I am pretty new to the Linux scene. I use linux at my school and it is great. Hopefully I can get it to run.. by the way, what do you guys feel is the best distribution of Linux.

 

[jtshaw]

Glad you asked! Slackware!!! My reasons for this are pretty simple, I hate bloat and Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, and most other distros are all about bloat. I don't like non-standard directory placement, I don't like non-standard gui tools. I really think it is easier, and cleaner to edit textfiles for configuration. I think Debian would be nice too but I haven't really ever dabbled in it, I hear it is difficult to install.

 

[jtshaw]

crap, double post, how does that happen...

 

[Sensei]

If you are using mandrake 7.2 you can use the geforce cards...

i have a tnt2 and it works great!