# Nouveau or nvidia-drivers for GeForce 2 MX/MX400?

## audiodef

Here's my video card:

```

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)

```

Can I use nouveau or nvidia-drivers (either, I don't care), or is this simply not possible? I've had no luck despite trying different things all day. I'm either missing something, or it's just not possible on this machine.

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## BradN

I believe you'll need to use the oldest series of nvidia-drivers to have any luck with that, and I don't think nvidia updated those drivers for the newer X servers, so you might need an older xorg as well.

For something like that, if you don't need opengl, give nouveau a try but if it doesn't want to cooperate, you'll have to try older nvidia-drivers.  If performance and xv and things like that really don't matter at all, you may be able to use the vesafb driver.

Hopefully nouveau gets more compatibility and starts working with the older stuff as nvidia stops supporting them.

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## Hu

It is not clear if you presently have no use of X or if you specifically need access to the advanced features of the card.  If you just need a working X server, I have had fairly consistent luck with getting x11-drivers/xf86-video-nv to drive nVidia cards.  This will not enable any of the fancy features you get with the proprietary drivers or the current Nouveau drivers, but it will give you access to a basic terminal/e-mail/browser.

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## BradN

I can confirm the nv driver should work well on a geforce2.  I've had a lot of crashing/lockup issues with it on newer cards though.

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## jburns

If you use the nvidia drivers use nvidia-drivers-96.43.18 which should work with the 1.7 x11-base/xorg-server

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## BradN

Maybe I was thinking of the tnt2 chips, those I'm certain aren't supported by nvidia in conjunction with newer xorg, perhaps geforce2 is still hanging in there.

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## M

71.* series is not supported anymore, but that is driver for riva, tnt etc.

96.* will eventually get support for xorg-server 1.8, you can use that driver for now only with 1.7

I use nouveau on my old desktop with geforce2 and it perform better than 96.* , I mean xv and 2d is faster.

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## audiodef

M, how did you get it working? The furthest I've gotten was to the point where the X attempts to load the nouveau module, but ends with a "device not found" error. 

Is it because I have a 64-bit system?

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## M

Hi, can you load nouveau module manually? You must have kernel module loaded even if you don't want dri.

I don't have in kernel nouveau driver, I have libdrm, xf86-video-nouveau and mesa from x11 overlay, live ebuilds, although I didn't update for some time. nouveau-firmware is not needed for old cards, I think, but I have that too. You must have all kind of stuff in kernel, don't know if those are just a warnings or ebuild will fail without them, but look at CONFIG_CHECK in nouveau-drm ebuilds for details.

I used 96.* drivers and earlier I think for a long time, and those worked properly, but lately with new versions of xorg-server you can notice a drop of performance in 2d, everything feels laggy and slow... after I switched to nouveau I never tried nvidia-drivers again, maybe I will when nvidia update those old drivers. 

And I try from time to time nouveau with my newer desktop which is 64bit so that is no reason to not work.

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## audiodef

 *jburns wrote:*   

> If you use the nvidia drivers use nvidia-drivers-96.43.18 which should work with the 1.7 x11-base/xorg-server

 

Using zen-sources, I got this version of nvidia-drivers working!

Now I just need to try to configure things so that games pipe the sound out of jack, as I have only an external sound card for this machine, and it's not driven by alsa.

Thanks, everyone, for responding.   :Cool: 

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