Nvdia module

[Walter Garcia-Fontes]

I have a Fedore Core 5 installation in a Dell Precision 690. My
graphic card is a 

256Mb nVidia Quadro FX3500 Graphics Card

The computer was making some noice from fans and 
according to some private help that I received, it turned out that the
fan making the noise is the graphics card 
I was  told that updating to the newest driver the fan would turn off
after booting. 

I went to Dell's web page, and downloaded
dell-nvidia-8756-5dkms.i386.rpm

which supposedly provided a driver for this computer. 

Trying to install it, it told me that I didn't have the kernel
sources. So I dowloaded them, but trying to install it again, it told
me that it was already installed. So I tried to reboot, and : no
xwindows! It would tell me that it couldn't start it because of a
graphics driver problem. (here I installed kernel-devel and all the
other suggested packages to have the kernel sources and headers
accorrding to the version of the kernel I was runnin). 

I tried to download the driver directly from the NVIDIA web page and
compile it myself, but it would always abort, complaining that it
couldn't find the kernel headers or sources, though I swear they were
in the right places (and I entered the path manually using an option
that they provide in the script and tried a zillion of other things
and it didn't work). 

I tried a couple of other things, like downloading the driver from the
livna repository, and one of these things worked, I guess that driver
worked, as I could finally start the x server (and gnome), but I don't 
know exactly what solved it since I tried a couple of different things
and some of them remotedly. But the principal suspect is the livna
download. 

Anyway, now I don't get the initial fedora splash screen (I took the
rgb parameter out of the line in the grub.conf), no big deal, and I
also get an error at boot up telling me something like:
 
dkms - autoinstalling nvidia driver
...
bad install - build failed!

or something like this, but the x system starts ok, and the fan turns
off!

Now, another problem. Last night the kernel got updated by yum and
I have to revert to the previous version as the nvidia module will not
start with the new kernel. 

Is there any way that I can fix this once and for all? It's really
anoying to arrive one morning to your office with a lot of things to
do and find out that you can't start your desktop and spend all
morning reinstalling the driver from a text console...

-- 
Walter Garcia-Fontes
Barcelona