[conspire] new laptop Fedora 13 with NVIDIA graphics card - yum update - now only blank screen

[Rick Moen]

Darlene, just to clarify this remark of mine:

> A point:  If I had not posted that particular quibble, you (in
> combination with Chander Kent) would probably have mislead Darlene into
> thinking the proprietary Nvidia driver is _necessary_ for that laptop,
> which I'd wager is not the case at all.  I'm betting that it's provided
> only for 3D functionality and possibly some other enhanced video
> functions not essential to regular X11 functionality.

Separately, I suggested:

> You might want to use 'lspci' to determine what your exact video chipset
> is.

Since you say it's some Nvidia thing, you could specifically do this:

  lspci | grep -i nvidia

That will tell you what specific model of Nvidia video chipset is
mounted on your motherboard.  Armed with _that_ knowledge, you can then
look up what support the X.org open-source 'nv' driver
(http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/nv) has for that specific Nvidia video
chipset.  However, I'd be really surprised if 'nv' doesn't do regular,
non-3D video perfectly.

More at:
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/NVIDIAProprietaryDriver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#NVIDIA