Some considerations on newer hardware such as legacy-free systems, nVidia® and ATI 3D® graphics accelerator cards, winmodems and other things that don't fit in the preceding sections.
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. Mandriva Linux will be able to configure everything properly.
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 Mandriva Linux –– PowerPack Edition™, the kernel should have been installed by DrakX. If this is not your case, please obtain 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 Mandriva Club. Then run Mandriva Linux Control Center and re-configure X from there.
winmodems
are
also called controller-less modems or software modems. Support
for these peripherals is improving. Drivers do exist, but most of
them are in binary form and available only for newer kernel
versions.
If you have
a PCI modem, look at the output of cat
/proc/pci run as the root
user from a terminal
window. It tells you the device's I/O port
and IRQ. Then use the setserial command
(for our example, the I/O address is
0xb400
, the IRQ is 10
and the modem is the 4th serial
device) as follows:
setserial /dev/ttyS3 port 0xb400 irq 10 UART 16550A
Then try to
query your modem using
minicom or kppp. If it
doesn't work, you may have a software modem. If it does work,
create the /etc/rc.d/rc.setserial
file and
place the appropriate setserial command line
in it.
If you happen to
have a software modem in your machine, and you have a
Mandriva Club account, you might find an RPM package that
supports your modem (try searching on the
ltmodem
package for instance). You should also
take a look at the web site of your modem's manufacturer and at the linmodems and the Winmodems are not modems web
sites.
If you notice
your computer is really slow, or significantly slower than with
other GNU/Linux 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.