Linspire & nvidia drivers

[bardu]

Hi! 1st i'm a n00b in linux.
I wanna know if it's possible to install forceware & nforce drivers on lispire.
If true, it would be gr8 to know how (easy setup guide).
Thx @ all!

[Glorandar]

With the A7N8X-E Deluxe, we are talking about the nForce2 400 Ultra chipset, right?

I used a close sibling motherboard, with Linux, for a long time, although I have upgraded to an AMD nforce4 setup within the last year (its also well supported).

In general the nForce2 chipset is well supported by any properly configured, even semi-recent, 2.6 series kernel. All the nforce board issues I knew about were all fixed long before linux kernel 2.6.15, much less the even more recent 2.6.17.

Here is the (current as of 2006-09-17) nvidia.com platform drivers page for their nforce2 variant chipsets: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.11.html

However, they just list which mainstream kernel drivers support their components, those being: Audio (AC97 and HDA), Storage (SATA, ACHI and IDE) and Ethernet.

A couple of notes: Yes nvidia-raid is supported by the kernel (with the right initrd [initial ramdisk] setup that includes a recent version of the dmraid utility).

As I use Gentoo, not Linspire, I cannot give any useful specifics on RAID setups.

However, with Gentoo Linux, I have personally used both RAID0 and RAID1, with dual-boot Windows XP/Gentoo Linux, with complete success. With the right initrd, the BIOS RAID settings are fully supported and automatically detected during the Linux startup.

However, none of the hardware network firewall variants are supported on Linux. Yet they aren't missed as Linux has its own superb, fast, powerful, firewall in the kernel.

I found this linux user group wiki's page to be a valuable summary: http://www.wlug.org.nz/NForce2Notes

Good luck, I hope you find your Linux adventures as rewarding as I have found mine.

PS: You might find the links in this forum's sticky topics, to be quite useful...