If you have a Linux box and an NVIDIA card, the best drivers are available directly from NVIDIA here. If, after installing the drivers, they don’t start up automatically, you may need to add the correct alias to your /etc/modules.conf file. I’m going to assume that you are running a 2.4 kernel with loadable modules support inabled. If you don’t have a modules.conf file, you can create one:

/sbin/modprobe -c | grep -v '^path' > /etc/modules.conf

To determine what alias to add, look at your device number that was created by the NVIDIA driver install routine:

# ls -l nvidia0
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     root     195,   0 Jan 10 22:07 nvidia0

Our device number is 195, so we need to add alias char-major-195 nvidia to our /etc/modules.conf file. The next time we try to start X, the module will load automatically.