OK, I think it's time to give up on this and wait until nVidia can write a driver that works. Femme sent me the RPMs that worked for her, which (not surprisingly) are entirely consistent with those I downloaded from nVidia. I also tried removing all NV related rpms and installing the kernel and glx rpms from the LM 8.2 powerpack commercial CD. Did the edits to /etc/X11/XF86config-4. Ran XFdrake. Even rebooted.
It seems I can either have it with acceleration and an uptime of about 30 seconds after starting X, or stable without acceleration. Strangely enough if I run TUXracer immediately after starting X (i.e. before it has time to die) TUX seems happy to keep on sliding indefinitely. But try running software manager, or evolution, or anything else that does normal, non-fancy graphic stuff and the system freezes solid. Can't stop X. Can't ssh (or even ping) from another machine. Big red switch time. Even the startx sequence looks nasty. I get a blank screen for 15-20 seconds, a flicker, another 15-20 seconds of blank, a coarse grey pattern, a finer grey pattern, back to coarse, then finally an nVidia splash screen and a KDE startup. Seems like the driver is cycling through a whole lot of settings, trying to find a response, but who knows really? I need to get some real work done on this system, so unless someone has a REAL bright idea, I'll just leave the gaming in the Windows domain, sigh regretfully, and be resigned to the fact that M$ is going to keep it's market share as long as this sort of crap comes standard with my otherwise much-preferred OS. and yeah, I know it's probably some weirdness associated with my generic Geforce 2 MMX 400 DDR card, but guess what - that's what's out there. And of course with W$ it works just fine. Thanks for the help Femme. cheers Brian
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