Removing nVidia

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:49:11 -0800
Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:

> Right now, my desktop computer is getting a brain transplant.  Alas,
> the nVidia graphics card I've been using won't fit, and the new card
> is neither ATI nor nVidia.  Now, I know that once it's up and running
> I can use either yum or yumex to get rid of all the nVidia cruft, but
> that's not what I need to know.
> 
> What I want to find out is what, if anything, I'll need to do to get
> it booting properly in the first place, as the kernel lines in 
> /boot/grub2/grub.cfg all refer to kmod-nvidia.  (At least, I think
> they do, but I can't exactly check right now.)  Is there anything
> special I'll need to do, either at boot or later to tidy this up?

AFAIK, the kernel will be able to boot anyway, so you shouldn't end up
with a dead system. It will load the nvidia kernel module, which will
probably fail to detect any nVidia cards (since, as you say, none will
be present). This might force X to fail, but not necessarily.

Depending on how X is configured (do you have xorg.conf? what's
inside?) it will probably autodetect your new graphics hardware (if
it's neither ATI nor nVidia, what is it? Intel?), autoconfigure itself
and start a graphical session successfully. However, if xorg.conf
strictly enforces the use of nvidia driver, this may not work that
well. Another thing that should be kept in mind is that nVidia driver
disables the KMS (kernel modesetting), which might be a requirement for
Intel driver, etc. I am not exactly sure how graceful is the fallback
from the nvidia driver to something else regarding KMS.

Anyway, in the worst-case scenario, X will fail completely, but you'll
still be able to access a text console. If that happens, login as root,
do a yum remove kmod-nvidia, delete any stale /etc/X11/xorg.conf files
you might have, and reboot. This should be enough to reset the X
configuration to something that looks like a Fedora-default, and from
that point there is a very good chance that X will autoconfigure itself
correctly and successfully, out-of-the-box (after a reboot, of course).

All that said, I assume that your new graphics card is not something
very obscure which requires custom drivers etc... :-)

If your monitor requires special configuration (explicit modelines in
xorg.conf or similar), you can generate a workable xorg.conf by issuing

   Xorg -configure

as root (man Xorg for details), and then you can put your monitor's
special config in there. By default, the file will be created in the
current directory (most commonly root's home, /root), and you need
to manually move it to /etc/X11, so don't get confused about this.

That's basically all. Btw, I'm curious, do tell us how things
went... :-)

HTH, :-)
Marko