Nvidia 173.08 and Rawhide

[Andrew Farris]

Andrew Farris wrote:
> Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R wrote:
>> Now that Nvidia has a driver that compiles against Rawhide,
>> has anyone gotten Compiz to work with it?  What's the trick?
>>
>> BTW 173.08 seems to work well with 64  Fedora  8, including
>> Compiz, Flightgear, et al..
> 
> I was working on trying the driver tonight actually, but the suggestion 
> in the release note thread [1] is that you need to leave glx off, so 
> that doesn't sound hopeful to me.
> 
> http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=111460

I successfully installed the drivers this morning on my system with the livna 
173.08-1 driver package set.  I have a GeForce 5900xt (agp3) card and things 
work predictably for it in 2d.

They (as usual) install via:
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

There are a few caveats:

1) glx does not work, the module fails to load if you don't disable it, so you 
must add to xorg.conf:
Section "Module"
Disable "glx"
EndSection

2) the livna installed service script 'nvidia' does not work, and actually 
causes python to stacktrace.  I don't have more details on it yet, but disabling 
the service is necessary and you must configure xorg.conf manually:
chkconfig --levels 12345 nvidia off

3) since you've disabled the service that makes sure you have the akmod built 
for the current kernel, you have to be sure yourself; if you update a kernel it 
might fail to start X the first time you boot it unless you go to runlevel 3 
first, make sure the akmod builds, then load the nvidia module.

4) you must start X with the -ignoreABI switch:
startx -- -ignoreABI

5) end result is... you get a proprietary 2d driver

If nv or nouveau work for your setup I suggest waiting, there really is no good 
advantage to nvidia's 2d setup unless you have major performance issues on 
either of the other options.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
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