Hello
Attached is my idea for a nvidia wiki page hopefully this is
informative and good enough for the wiki, ideas and critique welcome of
course, thanks.
--
LostSon
http://lostsonsvault.org
CentOS - It's not just for servers ya know...
## my proposed nvidia guide wiki page ##
If you have a nvidia card and wish to use it with centos than follow these
steps to get you quickly up and running with the nvidia drivers.
#1 determine your card - in a terminal use this command /sbin/lspci -v and it
will give you something like this
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G73 [GeForce 7600 GS]
(rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Unknown device 196e:0380
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 50
Memory at fd00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Memory at c000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at fc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at fe9e [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities:
Unless you know what type of card you have then you can skip that part and go
directly to
here --> http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Fill out the values according to your card and it will determine which file
you need and it will come packaged up like this
"NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31.pkg1.run"(note this may vary depending on your
card) download this to wherever you wish.
#3 aquiring dependencies - you are gonna need a few things to build the
drivers so as
root in a terminal run this command
yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel gcc
this will get you all you need to build the drivers.
#4 building the drivers - Now you need to get out of X and to a terminal you
can have no instance of X running or the installer will not run properly. So
logout of your desktop it should take you back to gdm or kdm whichever you are
using. Once you get there hit
Ctrl+Alt+F3
This will take you to a login prompt and login as your user then su to root
and issue this
/sbin/telinit 3
This will kill X completely, what mine has often done is printed out some
messages about things shutting down then stopped so I have to hit
Ctrl+Alt+F3
again to get me back to a prompt, then I login again and su to root, cd to the
directory where you downloaded the NVIDIA.sh file and run it like this
sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run
The installer will start running and you can read and follow along answering
the politely asked questions. After all is said and done it should tell you
your drivers have been installed successfully. One thing I always do when doing
a first time install of the nvidia drivers is to check and make sure the
xorg.conf file got written. Now the installer will ask you if you would like
the it to modify your xorg.conf for the nvidia drivers, hopefully you said yes
but if not then as root run this command
nvidia-xconfig
This will move your old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.bak and create a new xorg.conf
in your /etc/X11/ directory. I always check mine as root with this
vim /etc/X11/corg.conf
look to make sure this is what yours says
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection
If that is what is says then you are already to use your newly installed
nvidia drivers. Now while you are still at your command prompt as root hit
Ctrl+d to logout back to your normal user and issue the command
startx
this should start up X and and you should see the nvidia logo screen come up
and then your desktop. This is a quick way to test X before you do anything
else. If you have gotten to your desktop of choice your new drivers are working
but lets make sure. A new program called nvidia-settings is now installed on
your machine as well, you can find it in your Desktop's menus, or use the
Alt+F2 command or in a terminal run
nvidia-settings
This will bring up the nvidia settings configuration tool. It will tell you
what driver you are running and let you set certain options as well. If all
this is working you can now logout of your Desktop and it will drop you back to
a command prompt. Reboot your machine and you will be back to all things normal
if you use gdm or kdm those will come up just like they always have.
## ADVANCED ##
One thing that seems to add some time to my boot times is the nvidia logo
popping up while booting up. So time to open a terminal and lets get rid of
that pesky logo. Terminal open su to root as always and use your favorite text
editor.
vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Go to your Device Section
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
Notice the Option "NoLogo" "True" that I have added this will remove the logo
appearing while booting up and logging in.
Compiz - many people like the wizz bang flashy effec
