Updating proprietary drivers from backports
From Mandriva Community Wiki
With each release, Mandriva Linux provides the latest available versions of the proprietary drivers made available by ATI and NVIDIA for their popular graphics cards. However, often these drivers are updated between one release of Mandriva Linux and the next, and these updates sometimes add support for newly released cards not supported by the version available at the time Mandriva Linux was released.
If you have such a card and you would like to update to the latest version of the driver so that your card will be supported (or if you need to update the driver for some other reason), don't worry: this can be done quite easily by following the instructions found on this page. As they are released, newer versions of the drivers are made available in the /non-free/backports repository.
Installation steps
- First, make sure have the official online repositories are configured correctly, by following these instructions.
- Make sure you have the -devel package for your currently running kernel installed, as root in terminal:
- su
- urpmi kernel-$(uname -r | awk -F- '{print $2}')-latest kernel-$(uname -r | awk -F- '{print $2}')-devel-latest
- (this will install the -latest meta packages for the kernel flavour (desktop586 or desktop or server) you have, this will ensure you always get the the latest kernel package and its matching -devel package via the updates).
- Update the Non-free Backports repository, as root in terminal:
- su
- urpmi.update -v "Non-free Backports"
- this will not enable the Non-free Backports repository, it'll just update it.
- Install the relevant driver packages, as root in terminal:
- If you have a nVidia graphics card:
- su
- urpmi -v --searchmedia "Non-free Backports" dkms-nvidia-current x11-driver-video-nvidia-current nvidia-current-doc-html
- If you have an ATI graphics card:
- su
- urpmi -v --searchmedia "Non-free Backports" dkms-fglrx x11-driver-video-fglrx fglrx-control-center
- Reconfigure your card using the Hardware -> Set up the graphical server -> Graphics Card, (you can use XFdrake to launch Set up the graphical server directly from terminal (or tty) (commands are case sensitive)).
- Open Graphics Card; the correct group for your graphics card is usually already selected (if you have a very new card, this may be empty or incorrect). Click OK, it will ask if you want to use the proprietary driver for your card. Select Yes.
- After the card is reconfigured you'll be prompted to log out, don't log out, instead reboot the system (for good measure).
ATI cards may fail to work with the proprietary driver due to wrong colour depth setting
Sometimes the proprietary driver for ATI cards may fail to work due to the X server defaulting to 8bpp color depth if no color depth is explicitly set in xorg.conf, for more information see 
Bug #49813.
This can be easily fixed by making sure that the color depth is set to 16 million colors (24bits) in Set up the graphical server -> Resolution, so when configuring an ATI card to use the proprietary driver always make sure an appropriate color depth is used.
