How to uninstall nvidia drivers in runlevel3

[Kevin Martin]

On 12/27/2011 02:21 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 26 December 2011 22:21, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
>> On 12/26/2011 01:56 PM, Kevin Martin wrote:
>>> Â If you got the drivers from the nVidia website and you are in runlevel
>>> 3 you don't need to do an uninstall to do the update as the nVidia
>>> module is not loaded yet. Â just run "yum update" and it will update,
>>> although beware what it updates to as far as your video driver(s) are
>>> concerned.
>>
>> I was under the impression that the drivers from nVidia were a binary blob
>> that installed a hacked kernel, hacked some of your system libraries and
>> installed the drivers without going through yum, rpm or any other package
>> manager, making them distro-agnostic. Â Unless my information's badly out of
>> date, you have to do this again every time there's a kernel update. Â The
>> blob's supposed to have an uninstall function, but it doesn't always (ever?)
>> restore the original versions of the hacked libraries. Â This is why I always
>> recommend using the kmod/akmod version of the drivers instead of the binary
>> blob.
> Not entirely true, the download from nvidia will get you an installer
> that builds the nvidia kernel module against the kernel headers, not
> an entirely new kernel. The only real differences that I'm aware of
> using kmod/akmod packages are:
> 1. You get package management which automatically tracks kernel
> updates so manually building the module with the nvidia tool is
> unecessary, the initrd blacklisting for nouveau is supposedly also
> done for you.
> 2. As you suggest, the gl library versioning is handled better.
> 3. Slightly different approach to X configuration changes.
>
BUT, and this, in my case, is a big BUT, the kmod/akmod nvidia packages won't build against the rawhide kernel headers due to an
issue with the licensing in the nvidia nv.c file (licensed NVIDIA instead of GPL) and the debugging that's turned on in the rawhide
kernel source.  You "can" work around this by simply changing the stupid license to GPL in nv.c (which is not really in the spirit
of the GPL licensiing but how the h*ll else can you test using the rawhide kernels and the nvidia drivers?) but you can't do this in
the akmod package.  I would *much* rather use the akmod packaging and wish they would build a "not strictly legal" version of them
for use against the rawhide kernels but until that happens, I"m stuck with this way of doing business.  And like I said, in the case
of Lawrence, once the 275.43 version has an akmod rpm, he should move to that to mitigate the issue of not being able to update his
kernels/headers when he wants.

Kevin