Installing New NVidia Drivers in RedHat 7.3?

[Nighthawk69]

Hi there...

I have been reading up on how to install the latest NVidia drivers in Linux RedHat 7.3 with kernel 2.4.18-5 and I have found a very long thread at NVNews that has a lot of people in it who are having a lot of problems getting these drivers in with very few solutions that work. I would like to make sure that it is going to work before doing anything, but I need these drivers in here too I would like to know if anyone has prior experience installing the latest NVidia drivers in RH 7.3 and how _EXACTLY_ they went about doing this? I would prefer "Linux Newbie Instructions" ... for a FAQ maybe?

THANKS!!

 

[andrey]

I hope these tips can help you

First thing after RH 7.3 installation you should be updating linux kernel to 2.4.18-5 and kernel source 2.4.18-5 is a MUST have as well (please use redhat update agent if possible). I know kernel source is a huge file but it's necessary if you want to compile nv kernel without errors. Restart linux.

Set runlevel 3 in linux configuration so linux wont boot into X on startup. If you don't know how to do it just open terminal then start Xconfigurator follow the steps and answer NO in the last question

Now download nvkernel and GLX driver
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86_40/1.0-2960/NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.tar.gz
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86_40/1.0-2960/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2960.tar.gz
It's easy to extract them from Konqueror file manager just right click on them then select "extract here"

The safest way to do next step is to log out from X and compile both files from command line. Go to nvkernel directory then type

make
make install

Do the same from GLX directory
If you can't compile nvkernel that means you didn't install linux kernel source properly as I told you in the first step.

If you are familiar with vi editor go to /etc/X11 directory then type vim XF86Config-4

Delete or just disable following lines

#Load "GLcore" # OpenGL support
#Load "dri" # Direct rendering

#Section "DRI"
#Mode 0666
#EndSection

Change line
Driver "nv"
to
Driver "nvidia"
save and exit

If you've done this from command line just type startx otherwise restart linux.

 

[Nighthawk69]

Is that what you've done and it worked? Because in the thread at NVNews where that info is found, there a 10 pages of people having problems...

 

[PG]

What's wrong with using the .rpm files for Red Hat 7.3 directly from Nvidia's site? Do those not work?

 

[andrey]

Originally posted by: Nighthawk69
Is that what you've done and it worked? Because in the thread at NVNews where that info is found, there a 10 pages of people having problems...

Yes, I've done this procedure on multiple machines with both Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS and GeForce 4 Ti4600. In every case I haven't had a problem compiling and installing these drivers.

Originally posted by: PG
What's wrong with using the .rpm files for Red Hat 7.3 directly from Nvidia's site? Do those not work?

Nvidia's RPM are compiled for RedHat 7.3 with kernel 2.4.18-3. If you haven't upgraded your kernel to version 2.4.18-5, they'll work fine, however if you did upgrade your kernel, you will need to install drivers manually.

 

[Nighthawk69]

Sounds great! I'll be following that procedure this evening!

 

[Gooberlx2]

yeah If you upgraded your kernel you're going to need to compile from source. You're also going to have to have installed the linux kernel source to do that. (Atleast I had to)

 

[Nighthawk69]

Wahoo! I followed those steps to the letter and had to edit the modules.conf file, but I dot it all working!

Thanks! Quake III works GREAT!