[CentOS] Switch to Nvidia from ATI

Wed Oct 18 20:40:59 UTC 2006
Alfred von Campe <alfred at 110.net>

On Oct 18, 2006, at 14:42, Jay Leafey wrote:

> Since you've already gone to the nVidia card it's a little late, I  
> know, but one of my Dell workstations has a similar display chip  
> (Intel 915G) and I was able to drive my Dell 2100fp at  
> 1600x1200 at 60Hz by making a couple of changes in the xorg.conf file.  
> Specifically, in the "Monitor" section I added a modeline for the  
> that resolution with some different timings:
>
>     ModeLine     "1600x1200" 160.0 1600 1664 1856 2160 1200 1201  
> 1204 1250
>
> Then in the "Screen" section I added 1600x1200 to the "Modes" line:
>
>     Modes    "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864"  
> "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

That's good to know for the future.  But how did you come up with  
those numbers for the ModeLine entry?  I played around with the  
HorizSync and VertRefresh entries to no avail.

> It's not that hard, thankfully.  You can specify the kernel version  
> to the installer script, as well as just installing a new kernel  
> module rather than a full reinstall:
>
>     /usr/local/bin/nvidia-installer --kernel-module-only --kernel- 
> name=(kernel version)
>
> For example, when the new kernel (kernel-2.6.9-42.0.3.plus.c4) came  
> out, I just ran this command before rebooting to the new kernel:
>
>     /usr/local/bin/nvidia-installer --kernel-module-only --kernel- 
> name=2.6.9-42.0.3.plus.c4

I have not installed the nvidia-installer, but rather I run the  
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-XXXX-pkg1.run script with the -s option (silent)  
after rebuilding it with the --add-this-kernel option.

> It does require that the kernel-devel{,-smp} package be installed  
> for the kernel for which you want to rebuild the driver, but that's  
> not really a problem for me.  I've been trying to figure out how to  
> make this happen at boot-time before starting X, but haven't  
> pursued it too hard.

I got this to work, but it was a bit of a hack.  I'll contact you off  
list with the details.

Alfred