How did you do that? i tried an old NVida GeForce 2 (out of the 90's!) with a legacy driver, and OpenSUSE did not enjoy that one bit.
It turned out that the Neuveau driver worked just fine (including 3D support!) without trying to install the legacy driver, but trying to get the legacy driver to work made me nuts for a while. Never did succeed to get it.
The only hardware issue I ever had was with an nVidia video card, AGP not onboard, otherwise Linux has always picked up and used any hardware I threw at it.
I first started about the time XP was released, with Mandrake 8, got Mandrake 9 not long afterward and used it for 8 years or so. Only stopped because I moved here and don’t have room to set up the extra computer.
I’ve been dragging my feet, I need to go ahead and install Puppy on a USB drive, I got the Slacko version a while back on CD, works great and no hardware problems on this Toshiba laptop.
My recommendation is to get a version of Linux that runs on CD and try it out for a while before committing a computer to Linux, or a dual boot situation. Several are available, Puppy/Slacko and Knoppix are probably the best two to try.
You download the file, burn it to a CD as bootable, pop it in and reboot. You’re running Linux, and when you shut down, Windows is still there untouched, ready to go. It can also be installed onto a USB drive, and works the same way. It never uses the hard drive at all except to set up a swap file for temporary memory, same as Windows does, and you can use it without damaging Windows at all. I’ve run Slacko on this machine a dozen times checking it out.
Most things have different names, Microsoft has everything copyrighted, including the Start button. I’ve seen one Linux distro (distribution, same as a Windows version) that had an actual Start button, the rest have an icon of some sort. Firefox web browser is fairly common, and I think Opera too. Many of the applications work very well, adn you can also download a lot of other things if you want something else.
Linux also comes in versions specifically oriented around certain themes. Education, science, server, office...I have an older one called Cloudy Skies that is all astronomy, I think it’s no longer being developed.
Slacko looks pretty good, but I want to find a few more decent games for it, install those and get it running on a USB drive. Everything else is already there. Internet, word processing, graphics and photo viewers/editors, lots of system tools, and most of it is not hard to use. You just have to get accustomed to the different way things are named and physically laid out.
For example, right click on the desktop and you get the start menu. You also have 4 desktops you can use, and with most Linux versions I’ve tried, I’ve almost never been able to bog it down. I finally did it once by leaving programs open on all 4 desktops and playing a graphics intensive game. On a 266MHx laptop with 96MB RAM. That’s a pretty ancient machine considering my main Linux machine was a P-III 1000 with 512RAM...I tried and never did bog that one down.
Distrowatch is the place to look for anything Linux...
If you’re interested, try one of the Live CD based ones, burn it to CD and have fun. I promise it won’t hide your Windows installation somewhere in a little cubbyhole on the other side of the universe...
I’ve always just gone to NVidia’s website and downloaded the driver from them. I have to re-install it for kernel updates, but I’ve never had a problem with it not working.