[CentOS] CentOS 3.8 Kernel Update with NVIDIA Video Card

[Corwin Burgess]

Bisbal, Prentice wrote:
>  
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Alfred von Campe
> Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 10:43 PM
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] CentOS 3.8 Kernel Update with NVIDIA Video Card
>
> On Oct 20, 2006, at 22:22, Corwin Burgess wrote:
>
>   
>> I can think of two ways to solve this problem but I'd rather have some
>>     
>
>   
>> expert advice. What's the best way to boot with the new kernel, 
>> install the nvidia driver and of course update the NVIDIA kernel 
>> module?
>>     
>
> The following worked for me:
>
>    1. Download the latest driver packager from NVIDIA (e.g., NVIDIA-
> Linux-x86-1.0-8774-pkg1.run)
>    2. Boot the new kernel to run level 3 (or wait for it to fail to go
> to run level 5)
>    3. Log in as root and run ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8774-pkg1.run and
> answer the prompts
>
> Oh yeah, you will most likely need to have the kernel-devel RPM
> installed so that it can rebuild the kernel module for CentOS.
>
> Alfred
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> You don't need to reinstall the lated NVIDIA driver every time you
> update your kernel. In fact, this will cause problems if you need to
> revert back to your old kernel. You just need to install a new kernel
> module compiled for that version of your kernel. If you install the
> entire driver package, you will be installing new versions of all the
> related libraries, too. Then if you revert to the earlier kernel, that
> kernel module be an earlier version that doesn't match the version of
> the newer libraries, and you'll have a similar problem. Then to fix this
> one, you'll have to install the earlier kernel sources to recompile the
> kernel module for that kernel... And so on, and so on... 
>
> If you know you'll never revert to the earlier kernel, it's okay to just
> install the whole new driver package. If you might revert, it's better
> to learn how to install just the kernel module. I forget the exact
> syntax, but if you do 'man nvidia-installer', all the details are there.
> Even better, HP supplies the nvidia drivers as RPMS. These RPMS are for
> RHEL, and include a script /etc/init.d/nvconfig. At startup, this script
> checks to make sure that the current kernel has an nvidia module. If it
> doesn't find one, it installs just the kernel module, no fuss no muss.
> The HP RPMS are just the nvidia drivers repackaged into RPM form. I
> recommend either using those RPMs, or at least extracting the
> /etc/init.d/nvconfig script from the RPM and be done with it. That's
> what I did. 
>
> Prentice
>
>   
I decide to compile the kernel module for my current nvidia driver 
first. When I was sure that it was working then I would install the new 
driver. I didn't try the rpm route but did the following from root:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-xxxx-pkg1.run -K

This will only compile the kernel module. After I rebooted everything 
worked.

Corwin