Mark Hull-Richter wrote:

On 5/22/07, Dick Roth raroth7@comcast.net wrote:

...

Nvidia driver for 6200 LE video card.

No problems with CentOS 4.5. When installed (not upgraded) 5.0 X would not start. X works fine with 2.6.18-8.1.3.el5 but only with xorg.conf as written for 4.5

Haven't seen traffic regarding this problem. Has anyone else seen this?

I just updated from 8.1.3 (update after installation) to 8.1.4 and my nvidia driver broke. I had to rebuild it, and now everything is back the way I had it before. I'm guessing something in the 8.1.4 kernel changed such that this was necessary.

Glad to hear from you, Mark.

I was surprised to hear that you rebuilt the driver. I tried to attach the packaged (.run) driver I downloaded from Nvidia, but it was too large to send. Not sure which way to go at this point. Advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, Dick

Mark Hull-Richter wrote:

On 5/22/07, Dick Roth raroth7@comcast.net wrote:

...

Glad to hear from you, Mark.

I was surprised to hear that you rebuilt the driver. I tried to attach the packaged (.run) driver I downloaded from Nvidia, but it was too large to send. Not sure which way to go at this point. Advice would be appreciated.

This is the name of the .run file I have: NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-9755-pkg2.run

If you've never built this before, you need to have the kernel headers installed in order to rebuild the driver. For some reason my system can't seem to locate nvidia's web site from run level 3, so it just builds the driver locally - works for me, ymmv.

I'm guessing that you know how to run this already - if your machine can download the driver from nvidia, I'd use that one and not rebuild. In fact, I probably could have just copied the driver over from my 8.1.3 modules library to the 8.1.4 one (didn't think of that one...).

Thank you, Mark, for helping me get my thinker going again (it was asleep). It didn't occur to me, while first installing the driver, that it was building modules! Duh!!

I went to init 3, reinstalled the driver, reset inttab to rl 5...tada!!

Works like a champ. Have a great evening. Thank you CentOS!!

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 21:03 -0400, Jim Perrin wrote:

On 5/22/07, Dick Roth raroth7@comcast.net wrote:

...

Thank you, Mark, for helping me get my thinker going again (it was asleep). It didn't occur to me, while first installing the driver, that it was building modules! Duh!!

This method will work just fine, but it can be a little annoying to do every update, and can be one of those forgotten gotchas. You may want to consider the dkms nvidia driver in the rpmforge repository ( http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge ). The dkms modules are automagically rebuilt on the reboot following a kernel upgrade. Makes things incredibly simple to maintain.

As a side note ... you can also do this after a kernel install and before the reboot:

cd /lib/modules/`uname -r` find . -name 'nvidia.ko'

Then when you find the module ... do this:

cp -a /path_to_module ../$new_version/path_to_module

(path_to_module is the path returned from the find ... $new_version is the new kernel version, ie 2.6.18-8.1.4.el5)

then run this command:

depmod -a $new_version

(again, $new_version is the new kernel version)

Then on reboot all is well ... though the dkms rpm is probably easier.

One thing to remember is that all the nvidia drivers no longer work on all nvidia cards ... for example, the latest driver to work with the "GeForce2 MX/MX 400" is the 96xx version of the driver.