[CentOS] Re: nvidia drivers

Thu Mar 29 15:33:51 UTC 2007
Kay Diederichs <kay.diederichs at uni-konstanz.de>

bgschaid_lists at ice-sf.at wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:18:15 +0100
>>>>>> "KS" == Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> 
>     KS> Ralph Angenendt wrote:
>     >> Karanbir Singh wrote:
>     >>> Jerry Geis wrote:
>     >>>> Does the nvidia drivers (downloaded from nvidia) support or
>     >>>> work with the new centos 5 (beta) ? The version of X windows
>     >>>> is different I think.
>     >>>> 
>     >>> when you tried it, what problem did you have ?
>     >> It won't compile on a Xen enabled kernel ...
>     >> 
> 
>     KS> what version are you using ? I've got the nvidia drivers
>     KS> working for me here on the Xen kernel ( x86_64 ) but I've not
>     KS> downloaded a newer one, so whatever was on my machine from
>     KS> months back, just rebuilt and works.
> 
> I know this is a bit off-topic, but as we're talking about rebuilding
> the drivers for new kernels:
> 
>  - has anyone written
>  - or is aware 
> 
> of such a solution:
> 
> a script that during booting
>  - checks whether the nVidia-driver is present
>  - rebuilds it unattended, if it is not
> so that the user always gets a graphic login, even after
> kernel-updates. 
> 
> I'm aware that rebuilding kernel-modules without human supervision is
> not a good idea, but rebuilding the graphics-driver on a number of
> workstations after each kernel-update is annoying (especially if you
> can't do it on all of them at the same time, because people are
> ... working on them)
> 
> I know, that the script should not be hard to write, but I don't want
> to duplicate any work that has been done before (especially if there
> is a "standard"-way of doing this, which I was to stupid to find)

just put the following lines into /etc/rc.local :

if [ ! -e /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko ]; then
    echo "installing NVIDIA kernel module. This takes some time."
    /root/NVIDIA.run --no-network -s -K -n
fi

This obviously assumes that the package you downloaded from the NVIDIA site is 
made executable, and sym-linked or copied to /root/NVIDIA.run

I've been using this for quite some time.

HTH,

Kay