Livna nVidia problems...

[Chris Jones]

On Saturday 23 June 2007 3:16:08 pm Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On 6/23/07, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> > > Grr, sods!  Some might think that not an issue, since you don't change
> > > graphic cards that much, usually.  But you may if you test people's
> > > machines.  And the same issue bites you if you try to go back to the
> > > open source nv driver to get around something you can't get to work
> > > with the nvidia driver (I experienced that, myself).
> >
> > This is the worst thing about the official nivida installer, and why I
> > will never use it.
>
> Running:
> nvidia-installer --uninstall
> puts everything back to the way it was prior to installing the nvidia
> driver.  You're also welcome to continue believing and/or spreading
> the misinformation of others.

Last time I tried that it didn't work properly. I admit it was about 6 months 
ago but I have no intention of trying it again seeing as the livna rpms work 
fine. If it does work now I apologize (but will continue to prefer an rpm)

>
> > The livna rpms work around this and install the nvidia opengl libs in
> > such a way that it doesn't conflict with the default ones, but exist side
> > by side.
>
> That isnt' accurate.  They still conflict.  You can't use both sets of
> libGL libraries simultaneously.  What is your need for having both
> sets when you'd only want to use NVIDIA's libGL?

Sorry, I was not clear. What I should have said was the livna rpms installs 
some startup scripts that automatically enable the nvidia driver during boot 
up. If it finds, for a given kernel it is not available it puts everything 
back so the nv driver works OK. 

In this way you can have some kernels using the nv driver and others using the 
nvidia one, if you want, and you can boot between them as you want, without 
having to edit xorg.conf or mess around removing and adding back the nvidia 
driver. 

If you use the official installer you cannot do this, you can only switch from 
the nv to the nvidia driver and back again by manually adding or removing the 
driver. I agree this is not a common use case, but I have occasionally wanted 
to do this for one reason or another.

Also, by installing the livna rpm I automatically get a new kernel module each 
time a kernel update comes around - No mucking around installing by hand. 
This is very convenient.

Please do get me wrong, I don't really have anything against the installer per 
se, and I'm very grateful for what nvidia is doing for linux support. Its 
just that for obvious reasons the official nvidia installer is somewhat 
distro-neutral, and a properly packaged rpm or whatever, for a given distro, 
is also going to me more convenient. Just my opinion.

Chris