GeForce 6200 AGP on RedHat Linux 8

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Some notes on installing retro Linux on retro hardware, because XFree86 was still the thing in the early 2000s.

Here are some quick notes on how to configure the proprietary NVIDIA driver for a GeForce 6200 AGP graphics card under RedHat Linux 8 (not to be confused with RHEL8, which makes googling for this operating system version tricky).

RedHat 8 ships with Linux 2.4.18 (RPM 2.4.18-14) by default.

The proprietary NVIDIA driver exists in multiple versions, it seems like the one supporting a old enough Kernel and XFree86 version while already supporting the 6200:

100.14.13

169.04

The files that worked for me were driver version 169.04 from XFree86/Linux-x86/169.04.

I used NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.04-pkg0.run

The documentation says "Linux Kernel >= 2.4.7", so one would assume that 2.4.18 is newer and works, but actually trying to start XFree86 reveals an "Input/output error", and the dmesg output has more information:

NVRM: This version of the Linux kernel does not provide the vmap()
NVRM: kernel interface.  If you see this message, please update
NVRM: your kernel to Linux 2.4.22 or install a distribution kernel
NVRM: that supports the vmap() kernel interface.

So yeah, I guess Kernel >= 2.4.22 it is. Let's stay with the 2.4 series for minimum compatibility issues, and let's go with the newest one that has 3 components (naively thinking that some old software might have a problem with 4 components; either way, 2.4.x is outdated):

pub/linux/kernel/v2.4

I used linux-2.4.37.tar.gz

So let's rebuild a kernel:

tar xzvf linux-2.4.37.tar.gz
cd linux-2.4.37
cp /boot/config-2.4.18-14 .config  # start out with existing config
make oldconfig
make dep
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install
cp .config /boot/config-2.4.37  # for future reference

The make oldconfig step will ask you about new configuration options that appeared since 2.4.18 -- feel free to pick some new options if you can use them, or just stick to the defaults.

If everything went well, you should end up with /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.37 (the kernel), and /boot/grub/grub.conf should list 2.4.37 as an option. You can set default=0 (in my case, that's the index of 2.4.37) to make GRUB boot the new kernel by default.

After that, reboot and then launch the NVIDIA installer. If it complains that X11 is running (it probably is), VT-switch to e.g. VT 1 or 2 using Ctrl+Alt+F1 / Ctrl+Alt+F2 and login as root, then telinit 3.

Run the NVIDIA installer and let it do its thing (build kernel module, install stuff, update the XFree86 config).

It will ask you a few questions, build the kernel module, update the X11 config and do other sanity checks. Reboot or use telinit 5 to switch to the graphical runlevel. After that, you should be ready to go and have working GLX acceleration within XFree86 on your RedHat 8 box, which you can confirm from within X by running glxinfo and checking the vendor and renderer string.

The relevant parts of the glxinfo output showing the 169.04 driver:

OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6200/AGP/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 169.04

XFree86 4.2 looks like this in xdpyinfo output:

vendor string:    The XFree86 Project, Inc
vendor release number:    40200000