[CentOS] DKMS and new(er) Nvidia-drivers

Thu Apr 16 21:17:49 UTC 2009
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 1:08 AM, Sorin Srbu <sorin.srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:
>
> Diagonal thin black lines originating from upper left corner for starters.
> Then if I open a gui, whatever sort, that window gets those lines too. Menus
> are unreadable because of this, but slightly more readable if I move the
> mouse pointer over the menu entry. The lines tend to go away for a short
> while if I log off and log on again. Weird thing is that the lines are
> always diagonal and tend to always originate from the upper left corner of
> whatever window.
>
> This is with gnome mind you, and *supposedly* this one is the most stable of
> all the desktop environments. Haven't tried with KDE and xfce. Can't tell
> for sure if it's gnome or the Nvidia drivers specifically, but I'm leaning
> towards the drivers.
>
> It's not a hardware issue, as I've run rhel3 on the same machines w/o any
> artifacts.
>
> The hardware's two-three year old Asus mobo with a single-core AMD x64 and a
> rather feisty Nvidia Quadra gfx card. Don't have the exact details right
> now, but it should give a hint or two. All the P4-machines, as well as the
> i7-boxes, seem to work fine with dkms.

I've never seen this problem at all - running AMD 64x2 7750, 4Gb
memory with GEForce 7200gs card, nvidia driver
nvidia-x11-drv-173.08-1.beta.el5.rf.x86_64 (from rpmforge - duh).
I've used a 19" CRT, 17" 1280x1024 flat panel and, currently, 22"
1680x1050 flat panel (Emprex - cheap, but works great).

I tried the L&G nvidia driver last year some time, but I decided I'd
rather have the rpmforge working dkms driver than the L&G, even though
it's a beta driver.  When I upgraded to 5.3, that was the first time
the driver was actually rebuilt for the kernel since 5.0.

HTH

mhr