[CentOS] Fun with CentOS and Windows

[Phil Schaffner]

On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 21:58 -0400, Winter wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 15:09 -0400, Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
> > Okay, now I'm a little confused.  Is this driver package from nvidia
> > going to update my hardware drivers in the kernel also?  Or is that
> > needed?  Also, don't I need a better monitor configuration than Generic
> > VGA or whatever the default for an unrecognized monitor is?  I could
> > probably get away with that as long as the card driver can still do
> > higher res than 800x600 and the monitor doesn't balk.
> 
You should be able to get better resolution without installing the
proprietary nvidia driver. Sounds like your monitor is not being
automatically recognized.  Should be able to run system-config-display
(from runlevel 3) as root and set the monitor type in the Hardware tab.
Should then see higher resolutions available.  Set the resolution you
want, exit system-config-display, and then "telinit 5" to get back to
the GUI login.

...
> Once you're in runlevel 3 you need to first install the kernel-devel 
> package so that the nvidia driver can build kernel modules.
...

If you still want the proprietary  nvidia driver, nothing wrong with
Winter's fine advice, but would like to suggest another alternative that
applies at this point.  Skip downloading the nvidia drivers and instead
enable ATrpms repo, being sure you first set up the
yum-plugin-protectbase to keep from clobbering core packages.   The repo
config package at

 http://dl.atrpms.net/all/atrpms-package-config-115-3.el4.at.i386.rpm

should get you started (or the x86_64 version if appropriate - don't
think you mentioned which flavor you are running on your 64-bit
processor).  You may want to be sure that Axel is not still enabling the
EL4 or Scientific Linux repos in /etc/yum.repos.d/base.repo by default.
The stanzas for [release], [updates], [sl-release], and [sl-updates]
should all have "enabled=0" set.

Should then be able to yum install the metapackage nvidia-graphics that
will pull in the necessary kmdl.  In my case the related packages are:

nvidia-graphics-1.0.9755-18.at
nvidia-graphics9755-1.0_9755-86.el4.at
nvidia-graphics9755-kmdl-2.6.9-42.0.10.ELsmp-1.0_9755-86.el4.at
nvidia-graphics9755-libs-1.0_9755-86.el4.at

Seem to recall that for the CentOSplus kernel I had to install the
modules for the standard kernel and copy them to the corresponding
locations in /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/... as ATrpms did not recognize
the Plus kernel.  Not running the Plus kernels now so can't check.

Phil