NVidia Confusion

[zanderman]

I am going through the process of installing Gentoo for the first time but am a bit confused about all the conflicting information I read on the forum about the NVidia nForce 2 chipset, which is used on my MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard.

My Gentoo installation is based on the 2.6.7-gentoo-r11 kernel which I have manually compiled. I am now about to set up my network connection and sound and was going to use Forcedeth for the onboard NIC and i810_audio for the onboard sound. What has confused me is a post on the forum that says that the new NVidia driver, 1.0-0292, has been released and that the sound is better than with the ALSA option. Is it possible to just install this latest NVidia sound driver and use Forcedeth for the NIC?

When I compiled the kernel I included the NVidia nForce/nForce2 chipset support option, which I presume was the correct thing to do but what does this enable within the kernel?

My graphics card is a NVidia Gforce MX2 which is set up and working fine under XOrg, is there any reason to install the NVidia driver for this card?

Finally, another post mentions nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx, under what circumstances would these need to be installed?

To summarise:

1. For the onboard NIC would you recommend that I use Forcedeth or the NVidia driver?
2. For the onboard sound would you recommend that I use ALSA or the NVidia driver?
3. Can the latest NVidia sound driver be installed separately from the NVidia network driver?
4. Was I correct in enabling NVidia nForce/nForce2 chipset support in the kernel?
5. With my graphics card working under XOrg what is there to be gained by installing the NVidia driver?
6. What hardware requires nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx to be installed?
7. Will any of the above differ when I progress to the 2.6.9 kernel?

Thanks for helping me out with these queries.

[blueworm]

1. For the onboard NIC would you recommend that I use Forcedeth or the NVidia driver?
forcedeth is more stable.
2. For the onboard sound would you recommend that I use ALSA or the NVidia driver?
Alsa driver unless your south bridge has soundStorm, even then I doubt it sounds any better since the sound still needs to pass through realtech AC97 codec chip.
Besides nvaudio is based on OSS driver and does not support full-duplex(audio output and input simultaneously).
EDIT: AFAIK, after a bit of googling. your mobo does not have soundStorm(MCP-T) which means there is not much point in using nvaudio.
3. Can the latest NVidia sound driver be installed separately from the NVidia network driver?
Yes.
cd into th nvaudio directory and build seperately.
4. Was I correct in enabling NVidia nForce/nForce2 chipset support in the kernel?
Yes and no.
You must have nvidia IDE support. But if you have an nvidia graphics card it is best to not use AGPGART since the nvidia driver NvAGP is faster in nforce systems.
5. With my graphics card working under XOrg what is there to be gained by installing the NVidia driver?
Nvidia graphics driver provides high quality 3D graphics.
6. What hardware requires nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx to be installed?
Any nvidia graphics card if you intend to use 3D.
7. Will any of the above differ when I progress to the 2.6.9 kernel?
No.
NOTE: about Nvidia Sound Storm.
Soundstorm is only included in MCP-T south bridges. It is a hardware APU.
Hardware mixing in linux using nvidia driver will not work unless you have the MCP-T.

[the lone crouton]

[zanderman]

Thanks for your replies and for basically saying the same thing so as not to confuse me any further.

Here is what I am going to do:

1. Use forcedeth for the onboard NIC
2. Use ALSA for the onboard sound
3. Don't need to consider this as I will be using ALSA
4. Leave the nForce/nForce2 chipset support enabled in the kernel. Blueworn, when you mention AGPGART I presume that it is part of the nForce/nForce2 chipset support. I will just leave things as they are as I am not sure if I would notice any difference between it and NvAGP.
5. Currently I don't need 3D graphics and as the graphics card is working under XOrg I will leave things as they are.
6. See 5.
7. Once I get my network connection set up I will emerge a 2.6.9 kernel and compile it.