Well, I had to btreak down and get something that would give me a little experience supporting NVidia installs.
As you know, NVidia keeps their 3d drivers secret and proprietary, which means those drivers don't get on the download edition, and since the driver's wrapper has to be recompiled for each new kernel, it is difficult to make the commercial offering work properly--since linux distros don't have the source, the installation is always non-trivial. After looking around, I decided to build something that could dual-boot for testing purposes and also fit in a small case with a CDRW/DVD as the only 5.25" drive, so I chose the ASUS A7N266-VM Hmmm, DDR RAM only... no problem Driver CD has no linux drivers which I found pretty much par for the course. Driver CD has NO DRIVERS FOR winNT, Win2K, or WinXP, and the manual says the graphics _won't_ work with them!!! Mandrake 8.2 is running using the XFree drivers, and I will soon (this weekend) be taking the plunge tfor the binary only drivers (You can bet this computer gets its very own DMZ on my LAN; I absolutely do not trust binary-only proggies that can rub shoulders with the kernel.) Now we have the largest selling board maker producing for the inexpensive computer market a single integrated board, very new and about half the price of previous NForce boards, and it tops out at WinME or Win98SE.... Does ASUS know or _very_ strongly suspect something we don't? It seems a high-production item like this would be a huge gamble unless their inside information says a great deal about future OS usage patterns, or they think someone's bubble is about to burst, or implode. Civileme
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