Getting different results with Fedora 19 and older nvidia card

Question

Booted machine from livecd image, and the gnome3 worked.

Used Fedup to upgrade an Fedora 18 setup to Fedor 19, and gnome3 doesn't work (Opps screen), but KDE and Xfce does.

Did a clean install from the DVD image of Fedora 19 to a new hard disk, and gnome3 doesn't work, kde regular doesn't work, kde failsafe works, and xfce works.

The machine has a nvidia geforce FX 5200 card, which I know is old, but that is what my classroom has in all 20 machines. So, not just a matter of getting a different card. Long ago was using the nvidia driver from there site, but they dropped support for the older cards, so had to switch to the nouvea driver.

Any suggestions, or just have to stick with xfce..

Answer 1

What about "xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-173xx"

Name : xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-173xx
Arch : i686
Version : 173.14.38
Release : 1.fc19
Size : 2.2 M
Repo : rpmfusion-nonfree-updates/19/i386
Summary : NVIDIA's 173xx serie proprietary display driver for NVIDIA graphic cards
URL : http://www.nvidia.com/
Licence : Redistributable, no modification permitted
Description : This package provides the legacy NVIDIA display driver of the 173xx serie  : which allows for hardware accelerated rendering with
NVIDIA chipsets : Legacy releases for GeForce 5 series GPUs.

This one is available on the http://www.rpmfusion.org site.