Compiling NVIDIA driver for -ntpl kernel

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, Ossama Khayaat wrote:

>> From: Marc Schwartz [mailto:MSchwartz at MedAnalytics.com]
>> Don't forget to remove the Mesa-LibGL rpm before doing that.
>> 
>> Use:
>> 
>> rpm -e --nodeps XFree86-Mesa-libGL
>> 
>> You will need to do that before running both of the NVidia install
>> processes and will need to repeat that when there are XFree86 and
>kernel
>> updates.
>> 
>> Also, I have found that removing the Mesa-libGL will cause some
>> dependency issues when using up2date. So be aware that you may need to
>> uninstall it again after some updates.
>
>If I may ask, why do I have to remove this? I've always used the NVIDIA
>driver, before fedora, and never had a problem.

Because Nvidia's driver installation just blows away the 
installed libGL libraries from XFree86-Mesa-libGL, and that just 
happened to work randomly before.  That was NEVER the proper way 
to handle it.

Now, we provide multiple libGL libraries, and Nvidia's installer 
doesn't know about them, so it doesn't delete them all.  As such, 
when you run OpenGL applications, the dynamic linker will use the 
first libGL found, and that is the TLS i686 libGL, not Nvidias.

I've contacted Nvidia privately in order to try to come up with a 
long term solution with them that is beneficial for everyone, and 
isn't an ugly hack or deleting random OS provided files.  They've 
responded and are interested in working to find a solution.

So, at some point in the future, these problems will hopefully be 
moot.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat