How to Install Nvidia Driver in Fedora12?
Marko Vojinovic
vvmarko at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 12:06:23 UTC 2010
On Wednesday 17 March 2010 04:15:51 am Marcel Rieux wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 2:55 AM, Amiga5 <Amiga5 at live.com> wrote:
> > in your grub.conf add
> >
> > In order to keep compatibility with nouveau
>
> lsmod | grep nouveau
>
> outputs nothing. So, I suppose I don't have compatibility with Nouveau.
lsmod lists modules that are currently loaded into the kernel. It has nothing
whatsoever to do with compatibility.
Compatibility is about nvidia drivers and nouveau drivers, or rather lack of
compatibility. You must not have both modules loaded, they are mutually
exclusive (if they are to work properly). However, you have to make sure
yourself that when you use one the other does not load. That's why you have to
either blacklist nouveau or rebuild initramfs if you want to use nvidia.
That's also why you have to completely uninstall nvidia if you want to use
nouveau.
> My question here is what's the purpose of keeping compatibility with
> Nouveau. To switch back and forth from Nvidia to Nouveau?
There is no compatibility between them. They are completely incompatible, and
cannot live together at all.
> > , you either need to recreate the
> > initrd manually after the driver has been installed, or add a command
> > line option to the kernel. To recreate the initrd:
> >
> > su -
> > mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname
> > -r)-nouveau.img dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
>
> I have:
>
> $ locate initramfs
> /boot/initramfs-2.6.31.12-174.2.22.fc12.x86_64.img
> /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.9-67.fc12.x86_64.img
> /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.9-70.fc12.x86_64.img
>
> $ locate /boot/initrd
> /boot/initrd-2.6.29.5-191.fc11.x86_64-nouveau.img
Of course you have the files, but they have different contents. Note that he
said *recreate*. That means moving the file elsewhere and creating a new file
(with the same name but different contents) in its place. The fact that you
have those files in /boot doesn't say anything about their contents.
> > To use the default initrd, but disable the nouveau driver, edit
> > /etc/grub.conf and add the following to the end of the line(s) starting
> > with
> >
> > 'kernel':
> > rdblacklist=nouveau
>
> I don't have this in grub.conf
That is an alternative to recreating the initramfs above, more convenient for
some users. You can either recreate initramfs, or use the rdblacklist option
in the kernel, with the same goal of preventing nouveau from loading at
startup. And you have to do that if you want to use the nvidia blob instead of
nouveau.
And the other way around, if you want to use nouveau, you must uninstall and
remove all traces of the nvidia blob (and recreate initramfs yet again, and/or
remove the rdblacklist option from grub.conf, in order to re-allow nouveau to
load at boot).
> So, from what I gather, my configuration shouldn't prevent the Nvidia
> driver from working in any way, correct?
You didn't actually provide any information above that can be used to
determine the state of your system. Since you don't have the rdblacklist
option in grub.conf, I can only guess that *if* your initramfs is original
from the installation, nouveau should get loaded and you should *not* try to
use the nvidia driver. However, *if* you did recreate the initramfs to
blacklist nouveau (after installing the nvida blob from rpmfusion), than you
should be ok to run the nvidia driver.
Does this make things clearer?
Marko
P.S. Marcel, note the total absence of smileys and the lack of "HTH" in my
signature above. It might have something to do with car differentials and
sarcasm. Think about it.
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