[ale] Nvidia driver update required

[Dow_Hurst]

If you have a later Nvidia card and the 7xxx version of the Nvidia driver, I recommend updating to the latest driver 7664 that is available.  I was experiencing several problems in different applications for certain types of OpenGL operations.  Updating to the latest driver fixed all of the problems and made my applications, Maestro from Schrodinger Inc and VMD from http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd, become very stable.

Under SUSE 9.3 the online update doesn't update to the latest driver, but updates to the driver specified in the fetchnvidia script.  You can use the online update to reinstall and not delete the fetchnvidia.sh patch.  It is located under /var/lib/YaST2/you/scripts.  Copy the script somewhere and modify it to grab the latest version of the driver.  Remember to init 3 to shutdown X, update /etc/inittab to have the default runlevel as 3, remove the /tmp/.X0-lock file, and have the latest online update of the SUSE kernel source installed before you run the fetchnvidia script.  It will download the driver, uninstall the old driver, compile the module for the new driver, and install it.  Check the /var/log/nvidia-installer.log to see how successful the script was.  If it exited with no errors then the driver was downloaded to /usr/share/doc/nvidia and the kernel module was compiled and installed properly.  You can init 5 to check out if X will start up properly.  If it does, then update your /etc/inittab to have runlevel 5 as the default.

I was getting crashes on drawing certain ribbon types that require "quad strips", some type of OpenGL drawing type, due to bugs in the driver.  Best wishes,
Dow

PS.  You can always just download the nvidia driver, NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7664-pkg1.run, and run it directly yourself if you want.

No sig.