I have never had much luck with the Livna rpms. It may be because of the
"legacy" status of my video card or it may be something else.
My usual method for building it is to get to init level 3. Build the
commercial driver and reboot. You also have to rebuild every time you
upgrade your kernel or the X OpenGL components.
livna also have the legacy drivers - using it right now just fine.
I would always recommend an rpm based install over the regular nvidia
installer any day, just my personal opinion - has far to my issues with the
nvidia installer in the past.
Chris