[CentOS] Nvidia Geforce 5200 graphic card

Thu Aug 17 10:59:16 UTC 2006
Philip Wyett <philipwyett at blueyonder.co.uk>

On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 06:21 -0400, Phil Schaffner wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 09:16 +0100, Philip Wyett wrote:
> > If it was a server where uptime was important then use of telinit
> > would
> > be appropriate. But not many folks install the proprietary nvidia
> > driver
> > on servers and for workstations or laptops reboots don't really
> > matter.
> > Describing it as bad practice is ridiculous.
> 
> Very nice howto with the exception of the reboot advice.  It is somewhat
> short of ridiculous to describe unnecessary reboots as bad practice
> IMHO.  Newbies would be well served to see that one of the [many] great
> advantages of Linux over Redmond OSs is the absence of the perpetual
> reboot cycle.  Rebooting for every change is way too windows-like for my
> taste, and I have workstation (and server) machines that regularly go
> months without a reboot in the absence of kernel updates.
> 

For server and uptime I totally agree, but for workstations and laptops
I see a couple of boots as no great shakes. I wrote the howto in 10
minutes to give a straight through way to do a good install that has the
least amount of chance of side affects and geared towards the total
newbie. I feel adding multiple ways of doing one thing in a howto as a
way to possibly confuse. This is why I did not go into depth with
telinit.

I won't do the turn your workstations and laptops off when your not
using them to save the planet. :-D

[snip]

> One other viable choice IS to use 3rd party repos, which may be easier
> for a newbie as well as being consistent with frequent advice to use RPM
> packages on an RPM-based system.  I have had very good experience with
> ATrpms nVidia kmdl packages; although I'd recommend against using Axel's
> packages wholesale for a stable CentOS system.  The yum includepkgs
> directive is quite useful here.
> 

Third party repos I have seen on many a mailing become a problem when
the repo falls behind the latest kernel release. Indeed this method has
its merits but there are a few pitfalls also.

> > Should I spend more of my time writing all the possible options just
> > to
> > make some people happy - Not a chance, I've got plenty of other non
> > and
> > CentOS related work to do! 
> 
> I hear you.  Perhaps someone can find time to build on this for a WiKi
> article.  Will take a crack at it if I can find the time.  :-)
> 

That would be good. The current one in the wiki does not really help
anyone.

> [other] Phil

Regards

Phil