[NCLUG] Mandrake and graphics card

[Person Who Asked To Have Her Name Removed From The Internet]

hi all,
I have Madrake 8.1 currently installed, on an
AMD Athlon 32-bit machine
but my graphics card died.
I went out and bought a 
PNY Verto ge-force FX 5200 AGP card 
got it running on the windows partition but does not
work in the Mandrake.
Read the instructions on the website and tried to update
XFree86 (version 4.1) ran the rpm for this,
but all I get is the Nvidia logo coming up and
intermittently goes away, then fades back in.
I cannot access ctl-alt-f1 to get to a command prompt at all.

So then I went out and got the ATI Radeon 9200 card,
but this one doesn't work either.

The websites mention somthing about Mandrake's kernel
not including something necessary for AGP to work,
but I could not figure out what/where to install!

Then I went looking for SuSe download, figuring maybe
if I tried another OS it would work (i found somewhere
that these graphics card should work for redhat and suse,
and i dont wanna buy redhat so thought I'd try suse)
But I couldn't find an appropriate ISO image of each CD
to download for my system (everything's either 64-bit or
not an ISO)

I used to have a Millenium Matrix graphics card.

Any help would be much appreciated,
-lost and confuzzled