[ale] NVIDIA cards and drivers

[Marvin Dickens]

Well, after all of the talk regarding nvidia cards and drivers, I
decided to do a little test. I took a machine with RH 9.0 on it that had
been in use for about 4 months. It has the standard "nv' driver
installed on it and it's driving a super cheap clone card with a nvidia
tnt2 chipset with 32 megs of ram. The machine is a amd xp2000+ with
512mb ram and a 60 gig ide ibm hard drive. It's got a scanner (Scsi), a
web camera (USB), keyboard (Non usb) and a mouse (USB). It's
development/crash box that I use for developing linux software. Anyway,
I back it up, downloaded the appropriate driver (In this case the right
drivers is  NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run).I barely read the docs... I
Hap-hazardly edited the file /etc/X11/x86config and removed the line: 

Driver "nv"

and replaced it with:

Driver "nvidia"  

I made sure the line

        Load   "glx"

was present and then removed the line:

Load  "dri"

I then shutdown the x-server and went to the command line with no regard
for safety. I ran the script. It complained there was a kernel module
mismatch and asked me if I wanted to see if a driver for my kernel could
be downloaded via ftp. I said yes, the installation script checked for a
newer module and came back and said it was not available. Then the
script asked me if I wanted to try and compile the module against my
kernel. I said yes and it did just that: It compiled the module against
my kernel and installed the module. 

Without rebooting, I reloaded the x-server and got the nvidia splash
screen with incident. The entire affair, including download, took less
than 10 minutes (9 minutes 24 seconds...I timed it...) In fact, this
email was written/sent from that session. I suppose the point is that I
did this upgrade without regard for the system (Like a total newbie
would do it. I would *NEVER* do any thing like this on a production
box...) and the installation worked as advertised. In my opinion, this
states volumes about the amount of effort that nvidia has put into their
driver module and driver installation scripts/programs. I am, for the
moment, sold on nvidia cards. 


Best 

M. Dickens




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