22 January 2007

nVidia binary driver and FC6

Monday morning, I get to the office, start my computer and see a X.org startup error caused by the nVidia driver (I updated the kernel ad video driver Friday, but being lazy and confident in Fedora had not rebooted after that). Monday morning is a busy time, so I reverted to nv and postponed the investigation a few hours.

Now I found the problem, it is explained is on the front page of livna along with the solution:

The new 1.0-97xx series from nVidia drops support for any card with a chipset below NV30, such as all GeForce2 and GeForce4 cards. However don't worry! Livna has forked the original xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and kmod-nvidia packages to create ones named xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and kmod-nvidia-96xx. These will be kept at the 96xx series of drivers and the original driver will be updated to the 97xx series. If you are using one of the cards named above, you can install 96xx like this:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx


Arghhh! The "beauty" of closed source drivers...

Looking forward to Nouveau.

3 comments:

  1. > and confident in Fedora

    Confident in Nvidia!

    btw why are you not using the nv driver? Do you have dual screens?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't have dual screens but I play games and like to impress people around me with Compiz/AIGLX

    ReplyDelete
  3. > and confident in Fedora

    Yes, this is what I meant: confident in Fedora that an update will not screw-up my system

    ReplyDelete