it is frustrating finding a distro to play with Nvidia

Ok, 1st off I tried to kill the desktop and install the latest drivers from Nvidia, and it never worked.. saying that I'm still running an X server.. long story, so I used the driver manager (in Mint 17) as well as in Kubuntu and a couple of others, and the only driver that WON'T crash the desktop is useless, as it only allows for 640x480 max. and the "recomended" 331.38 drivers just never get to the desktop after reboot...all I get is tty1 and a text login screen and nothing more, or it says something about not being able to start the X server and would I like to see the debugging info.

I have so far tried Linux Mint 17, LXLE, Kubuntu, OpenSuse,SteamOS,Lubuntu, and all fail with the latest Nvidia drivers. The 173 drivers are so old that it cannot support anything beyond 640x480 res.

Being a noob, I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to have a usable computer, I just want something ANYTHING that will work without me having a degree in how to run Linux.

I figured SteamOS would do the trick seeing as how they require you have an nvidia card, but it failed to boot completely.

My card is old enough that it should be compatible with most distros so I don't understand why I can't get it to work...Geforce 8600GT 512mb ram

h61 chipset socket 1155, intel G2030 dual core @ 3.0ghz, 2gb ddr3

Right now I'm running LM 17 KDE 32 bit with the nouveu drivers, so I'm obviously not playing any games

where did you get steamOS? it's not even out yet.

http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download/

Edit: It seems that mine was in ISO format rather than .zip but that was the other nite, and I have installed several distros since then, so all traces of what I did are gone from a personal standpoint, and I don;t wuite remember where I got the download, but I know other users on this forum that are using SteamOS, so I googled it and found a download (probably by accident).

Anyhow, I download an ISO and burn it onto dvd or cd, that way if my OS gets hosed, I have the disk to fall back on, and so far I have quite a stack of distro's on optical media from Antix to Suse

Have you tried Ubuntu?

It might be that your card is too old and the driver does not support it...

EDIT:

Going through nVidia's driver menu selection for your card and linux gave me this result:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/76881/en-us

I guess that is the same one for your card and newer cards. I do recall some lines that had to be removed from the startup when I installed the linux driver on my old HP laptop that had nVidia.

I know your pain with linux distros and video drivers, nothing like the windows world. I too have been distro hopping for the last month with the added complication that I'm trying to fold on my gpu and want a pre-331 driver to do so. In most cases either the pre 331 driver wouldn't work or the folding client wouldn't fold. I think I only managed to get a working binary (direct from nvidia download) install once, and that was a pain, and then the folding client rejected it. Opensuse, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and Debian have all hit my hard drive in assorted flavors.

Wish I could offer some help, but your example of using the Linux Mint 17 Driver Manager to install 331 is the only EASY linux driver install I encountered. That was easy peezy and flawless for me (it just only folds at half speed.... darn nvidia)

I finally just today got the 319 drivers folding and gaming nicely on Linux Mint Debian Edition (319 is the newest in the LMDE repo, hurray for me, sad for anyone not folding) but I had to manually install nvidia-xconfig as the meta-package didn't pull it in and run nvidia-xconfig to get it to work. This step wasn't needed on Mint 17, but maybe you could try it if you haven't.

I did notice on 17 (and 16 as well) that after installing the nvidia drivers booting would pause on a TTY1 Login but resume after a bit without me touching anything. Somehow I doubt you could be so lucky as to just need to wait a bit longer.

Only other thing I can think of is that my card is alot newer than yours. Have you tried the legacy 304 drivers from the repo? I was using those recently on 17 and they worked fine for me, the 319 are just better.

Tokae said:

It might be that your card is too old and the driver does not support it...

Click to expand...

Most likely the graphics being too new, LOL.

Yea, unfortunately once the driver fails to boot, I am stuck re-installing because I don't know how to revert from the command line, so like you ottoaxel I have been distro hopping. That's one good thing about Linux, there is always a burning program to burn another distro wile trying to figure out how to get a working system.
My stack is getting bigger. And No, I haven't tried Ubuntu...I figure that if Lubuntu, kubuntu and Mint, all derivitives of Ubuntu won't work, then why should Ubuntu? But I'm willing to try anything, but I'm getting kinda stuck on the K desktop environment though

Its worth a shot, I have yet to find a system Ubuntu didn't run on out of the box.

Are you downloading the drivers from Nvidia's site or are you installing them from the software center ?

from what I've seen its tough to beat Mint for us console challenged types, but I can suggest two more coasters for your collection if you like Kde ; Kwheezy and SolydK.

Kwheezy is based on debian stable, which isn't so friendly, but it comes with everything under the sun pre-installed (its a 4g download!) so you don't have to futz with it, including steam, which can be a pain under debian to get working.

SolydK is debian testing, but its put together by former mint guys, so its fairly user friendly.

As I recall they both have gui driver managers like mint/ubuntu that worked for me, I just couldn't get them to fold. (I've since learned I may have needed to add myself to the "video" group... stupid debian) not to mention I've decided I don't care for the K.

Doc send me a PM, I'll work with you to get up and going.

http://linuxers.org/howto/how-remove-nouveau-drivers-ubuntu

That is the process I had to go through to keep the nouveau driver from trying to function, while using nVidias driver..