This document describes installing the nVidia drivers under Fedora Core. The Xorg configuration loads the "nv" driver by default if it detects an nVidia card. The nv driver will work fine but will not provide access to 3D rendering features as providing with the compositing window manager (compiz) provided with Fedora FC6 and on.
The nvidia drivers are pacakged as rpm's maintained by livna (as are the ATI drivers). These can be downloaded and installed with yum (see #2)
However, to compile the drivers, be sure that the kernel-devel and kernel-header packages are installed as well as the Xorg SDK packages and standard development packages. Check with:
bash $ rpm -aq|egrep 'kernel-devel|kernel-headers|xorg-x11-server-sdk.x86_64' xorg-x11-server-sdk-1.1.1-47.5.fc6 kernel-headers-2.6.20-1.2933.fc6 kernel-devel-2.6.20-1.2933.fc6 kernel-devel-2.6.20-1.2933.fc6
The nVidia drivers distributed from livna are not compatible with the ATI (fglrx) drivers delivered with xorg-x11-drv-fglrx. If the ATI fglrx drivers are installed, then these must be removed. Check with:
bash # rpm -aq|grep fglrx xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6 kmod-fglrx-8.34.8-1.2.6.20_1.2933.fc6
If the ATI drivers are installed, then these should be removed, which can be done with:
bash # rpm -e xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.34.8-7.lvn6 kmod-fglrx-8.34.8-1.2.6.20_1.2933.fc6
The nvidia packages are maintained by livna. The xorg drivers are provided in nvidia-x11-drv and the kernel modules in kmod-nvidia. The easiest way to install the drivers is via yum.
The 64-bit drivers can be installed using the .x86_64 base architecture and the 32-bit drivers with i386. E.g., for 64-bit:
bash # yum install kmod-nvidia.x86_64 bash # yum install nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64
Note that installing kmod-nvidia will also install the dependent package nvidia-x11-drv. Also yum will install the correct package for the architecture if it is left off. For example, on a 64-bit machine performing yum install kmod-nvidia will actually install the appropriate kmod-nvidia.x86_64 package.
The kmod-nvidia package installs the nvidia kernel module into /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/nvidia/nvidia.ko. The package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia installs the Xorg modules, documentation and support scripts.
Once the drivers are installed, they can be enabled using the nvidia-config-display, which is provided with the kernel module.
bash # nvidia-config-display enable
The X server must be restarted once the nVidia drivers are enabled. This can be done by changing to runlevel 3 and then back to runlevel 5. E.g.,:
bash # telinit 3 bash # telinit 5
Installing and enabling the nVidia drivers allows access to the 3-D rendering and compositing features that are provided with compiz(1) which is available from Fedora Core 6 and on. See gnome#11 to enable the 3-D compositing window manager with gnome.
Use lspci(1) and look for 'VGA'
bash $ lspci -nn | grep 'VGA' 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6800 GS] [10de:00f6] (rev a2)
The PCI ID can then be used to determine if the hardware/gpu is supported, see Appendix A of the nVidia Driver documentation
See:
Stuart Moorfoot © Feb 2006 foo@bund.com.au