[CentOS] atrpms nvidia cannot load

Mon Mar 31 18:02:51 UTC 2008
Ned Slider <nedslider at f2s.com>

Sam Beam wrote:
> Hi guys - brand new 5.1 install here and quite happy - but...
> 
> The nv driver did not work at all for me, fritzy stripes and dots. This is a 
> GeForce 7300 LE which was working happily dual-head under FC6 with the livna 
> nvidia RPMs
> 
> So I looked around and it seemed like the ATRpms repo via yum was the best 
> option for CentOS. This is what I installed, it worked great with the 
> xorg.conf from the old system.
> 
> But then I did a 'yum update' to the system and got a new kernel from 
> centosplus (?). 
> 
> Now the nvidia module won't load. It's not happy with the new kernel. I am at 
> a loss as to how to make it happy?
> 
> what is the best way to install the closed-source drivers? direct from nvidia? 
> recomplile them? Is there some gap between updates kernel and the atrpms 
> modules?
> 

Hi Sam,

I would recommend the nvidia driver on RPMForge as it's a dkms-based 
driver, meaning that it gets automatically rebuilt upon a kernel upgrade.

You'd need to enable the RPMForge repo, see here:

http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories

and then install dkms and the nvidia driver for your card

yum install dkms nvidia-x11-drv

Check that the dkms_autoinstaller service is set to run at the 
appropriate run levels and you should be good to go (you may need to 
first uninstall the existing ATRpms driver package). Oh - you'll 
probably also need the devel stuff present on your system such as 
kernel-headers, kernel-devel and gcc etc for the driver to compile.

Hope that helps.