Miscellaneous

Abstract

Some considerations on newer hardware like legacy-free systems, nVidia® and ATI 3D® graphics accelerator cards, and other things that do not fit in the preceding sections...

Legacy-Free Systems. Hardware manufacturers have recently introduced what they call “legacy-free systems”, mainly on laptops[20], 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. Mandrakelinux will be able to configure everything properly.

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 Mandrakelinux –– PowerPack Edition™, the kernel should have been installed by DrakX. If this is not your case, please get 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 Mandrakeclub. Then run Mandrakelinux Control Center and re-configure X from there.

My Computer is “slow”. If you notice your computer is really slow, or slower than with previous Mandrakelinux 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.



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