Mission Impossible?

[Foxx]

Backstory:
A friend of mine and I just bought copies of Unreal Tournament 2003. We were going to have a weekend lan party with a few people, but after witnessing the awesome power of Linux running UT, :D he asks me "Hey, do you think we could put Linux on my computer?"
Mistake #1...
This weekend lan party quickly turned into a 2 day nightmare trying to do just that. It took us most of the day just to get an install of Linux to boot up without locking up. After several installs, we determined it to be the bootloader GRUB, and switched it to LILO. From there on, it was an easy ride. Until...
Okay, he's got a custom Gateway computer with an AMD Athalon 1GHz with 128MB SDRAM and a TNT2 card with 32MB. And we installed RH7.2. The kernel version is 2.4.7-10 I think. It's straight off the distribution, no special modifications. I tried installing the drivers off of the Nvidia website, but the computer locks up when I try to start the X server. I've tried everything to get it to work. I've installed the rpms, I've tried the tar files. I read the "installing nvidia drivers" thread. Very good NHF by the way, very easy and very detailed. It helped a lot, but I guess I'm just a very special case.
I've tried slowing down the AGP rate, and even disabling it. I've even tried the workaround that Nvidia talked about in the README text about TNT specific problems. Where there are some rare cards that may have had the wrong BIOSs flashed onto them and report the wrong video memory types (SDRAM or SGRAM), and having to manually override them in the source code.
Still no luck.
I've been using Linux now on my computer for a few months now, and I know my way around pretty well, I think. I haven't had any trouble at all getting everything up and running on mine. My computer is one that I built myself, and it's pretty comparable to his, except that I have more RAM and use a gForce2 MX400 instead of a TNT. We're both using the same impelmentation of Linux. Man, how can there be so much of a difference between our computers?! I think his computer is cursed... :D (its a bit of an inside joke between us, since his computer can't seem to take anything the easy way, this is just the most recent example, :D)
If anyone has any ideas how I could resolve this problem, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance,
Foxx

P.S. And if anyone knows anything about getting two Linux computers to play network games with each other (i.e. Unreal Tourmament :D ), or anything about getting two Linux computers to even network at all, that would be greatly appreciated too. :D

[bwkaz]

Which motherboard chipset? The problem might be with it.

[Foxx]

It's a Via chipset. VT8363 on the main chip, VT82C686A on the PCI Bus.

[bwkaz]

I should have asked the first time, but is that the chipset of both computers?

[Krisco Fatt]

Hi bwkaz, I'm the friend. No thats the chipset of my computer. The one thats giving us all the problems.

[bwkaz]

OK... but if the other chipset is different, and working, then that might be the problem. Or at least one way to work around it -- grab another motherboard. Perhaps (well, OK, probably) not practical, but it'd work.

I can't think of anything else to do about it, though, unfortunately.

[Foxx]

Thanks for the input bwkaz. Do you think a new video card would have the same problem with that Mboard? He's planning on getting a gForce4 card.

BTW: we have different chipsets, mine's an AMD 751.

[bwkaz]

Before sinking money into a new video card, I'd put your MX400 in there and try that. If it doesn't work (and frankly, I don't think it will, but it might), then don't bother with a GF4, because in all likelihood, it won't work either.

If your MX400 does work, then yeah, the GF4 should work as well.