[CentOS] atrpms nvidia cannot load

Mon Mar 31 22:52:51 UTC 2008
Sam Beam <sbeam at onsetcorps.net>

On Monday 31 March 2008 14:02, Ned Slider wrote:
> Sam Beam wrote:
> > 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.

Thanks Ned that works great! I'd never heard of dkms before. the best!

for the record, here is what I did since I was already running under the new 
updated kernel:

1) add the RPMforge repo per the http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories link 
with "priority=N" add to each /etc/yum.repos.d/*conf as instructed
2) yum erase existing nvidia* rpms
3) "yum install nvidia-x11-drv nvidia-x11-drv-96xx dkms"

ok, easy. then I had to figure out how to make dkms build and load up modules 
that would work under the running kernel:
4) dkms build -m nvidia -v 1.0.9755-1.nodist.rf
5) dkms install -m nvidia -v 1.0.9755-1.nodist.rf
6) startx

all is well! will test the autoinstaller later. This rocks thanks