On Oct 23, 2006, at 8:11, Bisbal, Prentice wrote:
You don't need to reinstall the lated NVIDIA driver every time you
update your kernel. In fact, this will cause problems if you need to
revert back to your old kernel. You just need to install a new kernel
module compiled for that version of your kernel.
I didn't know that. I thought the kernel module *IS* the driver. I
guess there is more to it than that.
If you install the
entire driver package, you will be installing new versions of all the
related libraries, too. Then if you revert to the earlier kernel, that
kernel module be an earlier version that doesn't match the version of
the newer libraries, and you'll have a similar problem. Then to fix
this
one, you'll have to install the earlier kernel sources to recompile
the
kernel module for that kernel... And so on, and so on...
OK, this makes sense to me.
If you might revert, it's better
to learn how to install just the kernel module. I forget the exact
syntax, but if you do 'man nvidia-installer', all the details are
there.
Reading the man page, it appears that I need the -k option. I
recently used yum to bring my system up-to-date, and yum installed
the 2.6.9-42.0.3.EL kernel (which is not yet running, as I haven't
rebooted). However, when I try to use the nvidia-installer and
specify the non-running kernel, I get the following error:
# nvidia-installer -i
Welcome to the NVIDIA Software Installer for Unix/Linux
The currently installed driver is: 'NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics
Driver for Linux-x86' (version: 1.0-8774).
# nvidia-installer -k 2.6.9-42.0.3.EL --ui=none
Welcome to the NVIDIA Software Installer for Unix/Linux
ERROR: No package found for installation. Please run this utility
with the '--help' option for usage
information.
ERROR: Installation has failed. Please see the file '/var/log/nvidia-
installer.log' for details. You may find
suggestions on fixing installation problems in the README
available on the Linux driver download page at
www.nvidia.com.
Even better, HP supplies the nvidia drivers as RPMS. These RPMS are
for
RHEL, and include a script /etc/init.d/nvconfig. At startup, this
script
checks to make sure that the current kernel has an nvidia module.
If it
doesn't find one, it installs just the kernel module, no fuss no muss.
The HP RPMS are just the nvidia drivers repackaged into RPM form. I
recommend either using those RPMs, or at least extracting the
/etc/init.d/nvconfig script from the RPM and be done with it. That's
what I did.
And where can I get these RPMs?
Alfred
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
