errors on trying to install latest nvidia driver with F12

Greg Woods woods at ucar.edu
Wed Dec 2 17:03:17 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 16:47 +0000, N James Bridge wrote:

> There have now been a couple of replies about nouveau grabbing the
> graphics card and ways of stopping this. Another method is described on
> this page: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-nvidia.html. I
> had expected that installation from the rpm package would take care of
> the problem. 

There is no way that it can given how things are set up. You can't
unload the nouveau module, even with root privileges, because it is in
use. So there is no way that an RPM script can do this either. That
isn't where the problem is.

> It is a considerable hurdle for an average user.

Agreed, I am an experienced sysadmin and it was a pain in the butt even
for me.

Linux developers are, of course, under no obligation to support the use
of proprietary drivers. That said, in the case of graphics cards, it is
well known that the free drivers do not support anywhere near all the
capabilities of the graphics cards and that many users are going to need
the proprietary drivers badly enough for it to be a show stopper not to
have them. So there really ought to be an easier way to do it.

I don't really understand why the nouveau module should even be loaded
in a configuration where the X server is not started. While it is easy
to work around this once you know the secret boot parameter(s) (I didn't
know about "rdblacklist", thanks for that tip), there are hundreds or
even thousands of boot parameters and figuring out which one you need is
indeed a major hurdle for the average user. While I grant that Fedora is
not a distribution that is really aimed at the average user, it does
form the basis of future Red Hat Enterprise distributions and therefore
this is a problem that should be solved eventually in a way that the
average user can handle.

--Greg





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