[CentOS-docs] proposed nvidia wiki page

Tue Aug 18 21:31:17 UTC 2009

Hello 
 Attached is my idea for a nvidia wiki page hopefully this is
informative and good enough for the wiki, ideas and critique welcome of
course, thanks.

-- 
LostSon

http://lostsonsvault.org

CentOS - It's not just for servers ya know...
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## my proposed nvidia guide wiki page ##

 If you have a nvidia card and wish to use it with centos than follow these steps to get you quickly up and running with the nvidia drivers.

 #1 determine your card - in a terminal use this command /sbin/lspci -v and it will give you something like this 

 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G73 [GeForce 7600 GS] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: Unknown device 196e:0380
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 50
        Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        Memory at fc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at fe9e0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>

 Unless you know what type of card you have then you can skip that part and go directly to 

    here --> http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

 Fill out the values according to your card and it will determine which file you need and it will come packaged up like this "NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31.pkg1.run"(note this may vary depending on your card) download this to wherever you wish.

 #3 aquiring dependencies - you are gonna need a few things to build the drivers so as
 root in a terminal run this command 

    yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel gcc 

 this will get you all you need to build the drivers.

 #4 building the drivers - Now you need to get out of X and to a terminal you can have no instance of X running or the installer will not run properly. So logout of your desktop it should take you back to gdm or kdm whichever you are using. Once you get there hit 
    Ctrl+Alt+F3 
 This will take you to a login prompt and login as your user then su to root and issue this

    /sbin/telinit 3

 This will kill X completely, what mine has often done is printed out some messages about things shutting down then stopped so I have to hit

    Ctrl+Alt+F3 

 again to get me back to a prompt, then I login again and su to root, cd to the directory where you downloaded the NVIDIA.sh file and run it like this

    sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run 

 The installer will start running and you can read and follow along answering the politely asked questions. After all is said and done it should tell you your drivers have been installed successfully. One thing I always do when doing a first time install of the nvidia drivers is to check and make sure the xorg.conf file got written. Now the installer will ask you if you would like the it to modify your xorg.conf for the nvidia drivers, hopefully you said yes but if not then as root run this command 

    nvidia-xconfig

 This will move your old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.bak and create a new xorg.conf in your   /etc/X11/ directory. I always check mine as root with this 

 vim /etc/X11/corg.conf 

 look to make sure this is what yours says 

    Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
EndSection

 If that is what is says then you are already to use your newly installed nvidia drivers. Now while you are still at your command prompt as root hit Ctrl+d to logout back to your normal user and issue the command 

 startx 

 this should start up X and and you should see the nvidia logo screen come up and then your desktop. This is a quick way to test X before you do anything else. If you have gotten to your desktop of choice your new drivers are working but lets make sure. A new program called nvidia-settings is now installed on your machine as well, you can find it in your Desktop's menus, or use the Alt+F2 command or in a terminal run 

    nvidia-settings 

 This will bring up the nvidia settings configuration tool. It will tell you what driver you are running and let you set certain options as well. If all this is working you can now logout of your Desktop and it will drop you back to a command prompt. Reboot your machine and you will be back to all things normal if you use gdm or kdm those will come up just like they always have.

  ## ADVANCED ## 

 One thing that seems to add some time to my boot times is the nvidia logo popping up while booting up. So time to open a terminal and lets get rid of that pesky logo. Terminal open su to root as always and use your favorite text editor. 

    vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

 Go to your Device Section 

    Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

 Notice the Option  "NoLogo" "True" that I have added this will remove the logo appearing while booting up and logging in.

 Compiz - many people like the wizz bang flashy effects of compiz if you would like those here is what you need to do. Here we go again open a terminal and su to root. First command 

    yum install compiz

 Now you are going to have to add more things to your xorg.conf file. So favorite text editor time again

    vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

 Device Section again but it should look like this 

    Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    Option         "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
    Option         "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

 Save your changes. Now log out of your X or desktop environment it will drop you back to gdm or kdm. Then login again and you should be able to use desktop effects all you want. For instance in gnome you can go to System --> Preferences --> Desktop Effects and enable them. There are many different ways to manage effects and such for compiz this will get you started, enjoy.

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