a couple video related questions

[volvoguy]

Hi folks!

I've been recovering from some major surgery and have been "playing"
with every distro I can get my hands on just to pass the time. So far
the only ones to stay on my various machines for any significant
amount of time are Slackware, SuSE and hopefully Ubuntu. I love it so
far!

Despite all my playing, I still consider myself closer to the newbie
stage of linux user, and definitely a complete newbie when it comes to
Debian. I've never seemed to get it installed and working properly.

Anyway, I wanted to point out a few little issues I've seen with
Ubuntu - and I completely acknowledge that I may only be having
problems because of my ignorance, but here goes. :)

I have an older Nvidia card (TNT2) and it seems to work better with
Nvidia's own driver. I uncommented the "universe" repositories for apt
and found an Nvidia driver via synaptic - so I used that one instead
of downloading from Nvidia. Once installed, I edited my X config file
to use the new driver, but I couldn't get it to work. After "modprobe
nvidia" it worked fine. I've never had to do this before though. Am I
doing something wrong and/or is there a config file somewhere that I
can edit to automatically load this driver when the system starts?

The next little issue I've had is that with many of the screensavers
(and specifically with "electricsheep" which I also installed via
synaptic), I get a lot of horizontal distortion and fuzz. So far I've
only seen this with screensavers. I wondered if it has something to do
with the way Ubuntu handles root access. If a screenshot would help
diagnose the problem, I'll see what I can do about getting one. Any
thoughts?

I realize that both of these issues are somewhat related to 3rd party
software. I'll understand if they don't apply specifically to Ubuntu
and try to inquire elsewhere, but I've never experienced these issues
with any other distro.

Other than these issues, Ubuntu has worked GREAT for me and I may even
be moving it from my demo machine to my main desktop. Keep up the good
work! :)

Aaron