[lug] NVIDIA GeForce2 Go Driver & KRUD (Was Dell Utility Partition)

[D. Stimits]

"J. Wayde Allen" wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, D. Stimits wrote:
> 
> > Side note: Always get the non-accelerated nv driver working before you
> > add the accelerated nvidia driver.
> 
> Yes, I'm currently back tracking to this level right now.
> 
> > IMHO, the nvidia drivers are well worth it for speed, stability, and
> > especially for OpenGL compliance (despite being a non-bleeding edge
> > version).
> 
> Yes, well ... this machine is a Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz, with a 15 inch Super
> XGA+ screen.  I'm trying to get it setup with the 2002-06-01 KRUD
> distribution (Red Hat 7.3).  So far I've tried downloading both:
> 
>   NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.rh73up.i386.rpm
>   NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.rh73up.i686.rpm
> 
> and although these seem to install using
> 
>    rpm -ivh NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.rh73up.i386.rpm

The above are kernel modules that absolutely require your installed
kernel be the exact kernel of some particular RH install. If your kernel
is in any way different from this i386 kernel, they will fail. Since you
never want to limit yourself to one kernel, you should download the
source tarball, and making sure current kernel source is both available
and *configured* to match the running/installed kernel, then and only
then build your kernel module in the nvidia tarball unpack directory.
You are almost always better off getting a recent kernel, and
configuring it and building it for your system, before you even start on
nvidia kernel module compiles (FYI, only the XFree86 modules are
binary-only, the kernel modules are open source). The only way to
guarantee that the module can load (if written correctly to start with)
is if the module build uses the same kernel source configuration (make
menuconfig or other config's alters the contents fo the kernel source)
as the running kernel.

> 
> without any big problems I can't seem to get the modules to load.  Keep
> getting the error that the module was compiled for a different kernel
> version.  So ... I grabbed a copy of NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2960.src.rpm and
> tried compiling that.  This says I'm missing various library and header
> files.  It may be that I don't have the source code for the kernel
> installed.  I haven't found that yet, but I'm trying to get familiar with
> the Red Hat way of doing things.  My more usual distribution has been
> Debian.  Figured this installation was a chance to get more familiar with
> KRUD.  So far I've been learning a fair amount - maybe a touch more than I
> had originally planned <wink>.

Don't use rpm's for kernel build (unless you are adept at rewriting the
spec file for your system), use tarball. You can get the source rpm and
do an rpm --install, in order to get source plus patches, but then do
the build and install without rpm. Kernel headers for user space are now
also a separate package, I think something like glibc-kern-header (I'm
not sure of the exact name).

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> - Wayde
>   (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)
> 
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