My old but venerable HP desktop has an integrated Nvidia display adapter and its driver which apparently is no longer supported by Nvidia. Several different distros have been tried without complete success probably due to this obsolete display adapter driver. Certain functions will cause the entire system to freeze and a strange pattern appear on the monitor forcing a re-boot. The monitor will run at 1920×1200 resolution some of the time (and under Win 10 which was previously installed) but not for Linux – reducing the resolution helps to eliminate the freeze-up. Which lite weight distro shd I try to allow higher resolution without having to re-boot ? Thanx. Bewildered Bob
If it’s a desktop PC, couldn’t you just get a used graphics card with universal support from an out-of-order PC and plug it in?
I mean: It’s almost no work, and any PC repair shop or recycling centre in your area should have plenty of spare parts lying around. This might be the easier solution.
Actually, I had a similar problem with my last Windows PC (now not in use any more): When I switched from XP to Windows 10, there was no official driver for the onboard Intel graphics chip available (still not). The XP driver still worked, but many Windows 10 programs refused to work with an unsupported driver.
My Belkin WiFi adapter never got a driver for Windows 10.
In the end, I bought a cheap GPU to plug in and a new WiFi adapter. Wouldn’t have been necessary if I had already fully switched to Linux by then, because both devices (as the new ones) work out of the box under any Linux version.
People tend to be willing to buy new equipment (or additional software) if Microsoft or Apple demand it, but if it is Linux, they expect some altruistic hacker to provide a solution for any possible problem for free. Sometimes, there isn’t.
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Hi Mina: you are probably right. But how do i determine if the motherboard will support a video card ?? Plz remember it’s “tired iron” PC and possibly near its limit of support. Also is there a possibility of the new associated driver not working properly (which appears to be the current situation).
Bewildered Bob
I’m not a hardware specialist. In my situation, I just looked for cheap video cards with PCI-Express (in your case, possibly normal PCI) connector on ebay, found some in the 30€ price range and googled for Linux and Windows 10 support and when I was reasonably sure, I just bought one.
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