10. Miscellaneous

Some considerations on newer hardware such as legacy-free systems, nVidia® and ATI 3D® graphics accelerator cards, winmodems and other things that don't fit in the preceding sections.

10.1. Legacy-Free Systems

Hardware manufacturers have recently introduced what they call “legacy-free systems”, mainly on laptops[21], but there are also legacy-free desktop computers. This basically means that the BIOS has been considerably reduced to allow you only to choose which media to boot from. Mandriva Linux will be able to configure everything properly.

10.2. nVidia and ATI 3D Graphics Cards

Computers with nVidia or ATI graphics cards need a patched kernel to be able to use OpenGL hardware 3D acceleration on OpenGL-compatible applications. If you own a Mandriva Linux –– PowerPack Edition™, the kernel should have been installed by DrakX. If this is not your case, please obtain and install the corresponding packages. You can visit nVidia's web site and ATI's web site and download the appropriate drivers, or you can download the RPM packages from Mandriva Club. Then run Mandriva Linux Control Center and re-configure X from there.

10.3. Winmodems

winmodems are also called controller-less modems or software modems. Support for these peripherals is improving. Drivers do exist, but most of them are in binary form and available only for newer kernel versions.

If you have a PCI modem, look at the output of cat /proc/pci run as the root user from a terminal window. It tells you the device's I/O port and IRQ. Then use the setserial command (for our example, the I/O address is 0xb400, the IRQ is 10 and the modem is the 4th serial device) as follows:

setserial /dev/ttyS3 port 0xb400 irq 10 UART 16550A

Then try to query your modem using minicom or kppp. If it doesn't work, you may have a software modem. If it does work, create the /etc/rc.d/rc.setserial file and place the appropriate setserial command line in it.

If you happen to have a software modem in your machine, and you have a Mandriva Club account, you might find an RPM package that supports your modem (try searching on the ltmodem package for instance). You should also take a look at the web site of your modem's manufacturer and at the linmodems and the Winmodems are not modems web sites.

10.4. My Computer is “slow

If you notice your computer is really slow, or significantly slower than with other GNU/Linux versions, you might overcome this “problem” by disabling ACPI support. To do so, add the following to your /etc/lilo.conf file:

append="acpi=off"

If the file already has an append= line, only add acpi=off at its end. Running lilo -v as root and rebooting your computer will make the changes effective.



[21] Refer to the great Linux on Laptops web site for more information on your laptop make/model.