On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 10:15:57AM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Your understanding is, on the whole, correct. However, you can always use akmod-nvidia instead. If there's not a kmod for the current kernel, akmod builds it on the fly at boot. It's not a panacea by any means, but for most of us, it's much better than having to remember to re-install the binary blob every time there's a kernel update.
The real question is, is the nvidia blob still necessary? In F15, the nouveau driver has 3D acceleration enabled by default. Performance might not be all the way to the nvidia drivers, but GNOME Shell runs in standard mode with the default nouveau driver. That should at least tide you over until the nvidia packages catch up.
I don't use nvidia's blob, but nouveau's stability is still not consistent. Maybe about 10% of the time X locks up when I open gthumb. If I ssh in and kill X, Gnome will whine and go into fallback mode. I must reboot to regain hardware acceleration. It's not a big deal to me, especially as compared to the rest of the issues with gnome 3, but I can see how some might prefer to stick with nvidia.
It might not be a big deal but the lock ups, though not very frequent, sometimes occur at very inopportune moments. Also irritating is the snails pace at which graphical actions happen.
But I am not complaining since the situation, in my case at least, is even more irritating with regard to nvidia. I have tried with both kmod-nvidia and akmod-nvidia and done everything according to the book but I really wonder if the installation scripts from rpmfusion are 100% adapted to fed 15. The installation just can't get rid of the nouveau modules so you just boot up to the 'desktop' but mouse and keyboard can't activate anything.
I even tried some contortions with respect to initram, etc. but to no avail.
A couple of years ago I had no problems with rpmfusion kmod-nvidia's
Alexander