Debian Linux on an Dell Dimension 8200 with an NVidia GeForce4 video card

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[ Dell Dimension 8200 ] Using Debian Linux on a Dell Dimension 8200 w/ NVidia GeForce4

Carl Bergstrom
Diane Genereux

This document shares our experiences installing and configuring Debian Linux 3.0 on an a Dell Dimension 8200 system with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 processor, a NVidia GeForce4 video card, and a 17" Dell 1702FP LCD monitor. (Because this system was part of a university-wide order, we don't have detailed specificiations or even a specific model number.) This is not intended to be a Debian installation tutorial; we merely detail some of a machine-specific aspects of the install procedure. The basic installation was quite straight-forward, with the exception of a few issues with the ethernet and video cards, described below.

Network configuration

The machine comes with a generic "3Com 905tx compatable" ethernet card. Unfortunately, this "905tx compatable" card doesn't seem to work with the standard 3Com 59x/Voodoo driver that one would use for a 3C905 card. We pulled the card out and replaced with a cheap 3Com 905cx card, which works straight off using the 3Com 59x driver. Perhaps a better solution exists?

Installing XFree

As usual, this was the hard part.

Drivers

XFree 4.2.1 (the lastest version, as of today) does not yet have a driver supporting the GeForce4 card. Instead, one has to download the driver directly from http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_1.0-3123. You will need both the GLX tarball (NVIDIA_GLX-1.[version].tar.gz) and the kernel tarball (NVIDIA_kernel-1.[version].tar.gz). To install the necessary components, you'll need to compile a kernel module; to do so, you'll probably need to recompile the kernel itself. We suggest the following steps:

Compile and install a working kernel.
Install XFree 4.x so far is as possible.
Download the NVIDIA files as described above.
Unpack each of the two NVIDIA tarballs into /usr/local/src/ or similar.
Follow the instructions on in each of the two new directories. Basically, go into the GLX directory and type make install. Then go into the GLX directory and type make install. The local makefiles should take care of almost everything for you.
Add a line that reads
```
NVdriver
```
to your /etc/modules file, so that the right NVidia driver is loaded at boot time.
Edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file as instructed in the NVidia driver documentation. After an earlier attempt to get X going using the nv driver included in XFree 4.1.0, all we had to do was to change "nv" to "nvidia" in the drivers section.

Refresh rates

We used the following refresh rates for the 1702FP monitor:

Horizontal Sync: 31-80
Vertical Sync: 56-76

Here is my XF86Config-4 file.

Video Modes

The 1702FP supports a native mode of 1280 by 1024.

Mouse (GlidePoint)

Select PS/2 with /dev/psaux.