Linux Nvidia drivers.

You really have your choice of three these days. I have had trouble with the nouveau driver, so as much as I would like to use it, I continue to use the proprietary driver. I need dual head support (not available with the "nv" driver). Nouveau support for dual head has never worked for me, at least not when configured from the xorg.conf file. It is possible to use the gnome "gnome-display-properties" tool and set up a dual head arrangement. The problem with this is that this must be done for each and every user, making it ridiculously impractical for a system with a multitude of users. It works just fine for the typical single user desktop though. This scheme apparently works via xrandr (the X resize and rotate extension) and is nicely done, even though it does not meet my needs.

NOTE: The proprietary nvidia driver overwrites libglx.so and this file may need to be restored if you install the nvidia driver, then later choose to use the nv or nouveau driver.

akmod-nvidia

This is a recommended way to deal with the proprietary nvidia driver. The idea is that the akmod "automatic kmod" rebuilds the necessary kernel module on every reboot. Take a look at: What you do, is to fetch rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm and rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm and whack them in with rpm -Uvh.

Apparently there is still a livna repo, for which you could fetch livna-release.rpm and whack in in the same manner. I did not do this (as of FC12 4-28-2010) and I was able to locate akmod-nvidia without it.

After getting the rpmfusion repositories set up, do this: 

yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers
yum install akmod-nvidia
On my system the kernel devel and headers packages were already there. Perhaps the akmod-nvidia package would have pulled them in via dependencies if they had not been.

The akmod-nvidia package will install an akmods service, which you can restart (in lieu of rebooting) via: 

service akmods restart

livna-config-display

This is an ugly wart. If you install kmod-nvidia or akmod-nvidia, you get this thing, which will (as near as I can tell) at random times overwrite your xorg.conf file with some ridiculous simple file of its own choosing. This is apparently a widely known misfeature.

There may be many ways to nuke this from orbit. The first thought was to do: yum erase livna-config-display, but that wants to take akmod-nvidia along with it. People have resorted to making the xorg.conf file immutable. Another option would be to chkconfig nvidia off or to edit /etc/init.d/nvidia and disable the business that runs livna-config-display, although that seems to be the whole purpose of this bogus service.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org