Fedora 17 not booting after installing akmod nvidia driver

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Swapnil Bhartiya
<swapnil.bhartiya at gmail.com> wrote:
>> With that said, a couple of questions:
>> 0. Please post your hardware configuration.
>
> GPU: GeForce GTX 275
> Intel i5
> 8GB RAM

I've got a two machines using GTX 2xx cards.
HW should be safe, I reckon.

>> 2. Have you followed the nVidia HOW FAQ?
>> (http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia)
>
> On that page it says PAE. I am using 64bit of Fedora 17, should I use PAE?

x86_64 is 64bit.
No need for PAE.
(yum install kmod-nvidia etc)

> I am not sure which drivers should I install. I tried both kmod and akmod
> from Yumex (one by one and at both times boots into Fedora and the screen
> get stuck with above mentioned em1: link becomes ready)
>
>
>> 3. Have you made sure nouveau is *disabled* in grub?
> No.

Big no-no.
nouveau collides with the nVidia binary driver.
This alone might explain the issues you are facing.

1. Install the nVidia binary drivers.
$ yum install -y kmod-nvidia.x86_64 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64
(You can remove the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 part if you don't
need 32bit support)

2. Edit /etc/default/grub
2a. Locate a line that contains "rhdb quiet"
2b, Right after the quiet, add:
      rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0
      (I usually also add vga=xxxx to get a nicer login screen. E.g.
If your display is capable of displaying 1024x768 you can add
vga=0x317)

3. Once done, rebuild the grub2 configuration.
$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

4. Reboot.

>
>> 4. Why are you using akmods-nvidia instead of kmod-nvidia? Any
>> particular reason for "build" the RPMs locally?
>
> http://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/315/what-is-the-difference-between-an-akmod-and-kmod

In general akmods are only needed if you plan to deploy self-built /
testing kernels.

>> 5. akmod-nvidia requires time to finish building the RPMs, have you
>> tried giving it some time to finish?
>
> Yes, Yumex showed it completed.

akmods run *every* boot as a service.

- Gilboa