Graphics card problem! HELP?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Andrew Syrewicze wrote:

> Just a quick question. Did you install the nvidia driver from the 
> repositories or the driver from Nvidia.com???

I tried the nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-new from the repos, and tried 
Automatix2 (couldn't detect the card to identify), and I tried an 
application caled Envy (which apparently is what NVIDIA translates to?), 
but Envy couldn't ID the card, and then I tried Envy in manual mode and 
that didn't work either.

Results varied from the white screen (which stuck if I didn't hit escape 
quickly enough) to X failing to start to complete black screen lockup. 
Each time I had to either boot to safe mode from GRUB or log in as an 
admin user and re-copy a backup of xorg.conf to the /etc/X11 directory 
and restart, after which it would work again sans extra feature.

> I have found that the driver from the repositories works quite 
> painlessly, though I don't know for a card that new. I'm running a 7900 
> GT Extreme and it works like a champ for me :)

How new is the 8600?  That is most likely part of my problem.  Any idea 
if there is work being done to support it in the open-source world?