cant install nvidia driver on arch 0.6
 

hi I'm having some trouble installing the nvidia 3d drivers from their website on my arch linux 0.6 system. I probably doesnt make a difference, bu tI have a gf4 64mb mx 440 card, and I've gotten the driver to compile and install on Slackware with the 2.6 kernel. currently, I am using the 2.6.4 kernel available through pacman, but I think the problem is that the kernel sources are not complete in /usr/src/linux-2.6.4 . So, I've tried just downloading the fresh kernel 2.6.4 sources from ftp.kernel.org, and get it to compile from there, but that doesn't work either. If anyone can help me or has gotten the driver running on their arch system, please do help me it would be much appreciated.

I'm using Arch 0.6 at the moment, and the latest nVidia's drivers...altough I have a much older card than you do, but still my drivers work ok. I recompiled my kernel from source (without pacman or abs) and after it just installed the drivers....

do you get any kind of error msgs? if you do, what?

if you want, you can try downloading new sources from kernel.org and compiling the kernel from them, after which installing the nvidia driver. in my system it was a funny thing, because if I installed the drivers for one kernel, I couldn't use them with any other kernel than the one I installed the drivers with.

post the error messages if you got them... I haven't had too much trouble of my nvidia's drivers on arch. I suppose you shouldn't either have, so let's try and solve this ;)

thanks for your suggestion about recompiling the kernel, I would be able to do this but I want to avoid doing so for as long as possible because I like to upgrade the kernel using pacman.

About the error messages, the nvidia installer exited with a simple "Unable to build the kernel module", and then it told me to read the contents of /var/log/nvidia-installer.log. I read that, and the only error I found was "make[2]: *** No rule to make target '/usr/src/linux-2.6.4/arch/i386/Makefile'. Stop."

go figure, no such Makefilefile exists, nor does any such directory, which leads me to think that the kernel sources in /usr/src/linux-2.6.4 are not complete. Maybe i'm missing some type of kernel source package? thanks for any help

No nvidia for me either. I get "Unable to determine the NVIDIA kernel module filename" using 2.6.4 sources from kernel.org and the latest nvidia .run. It seems from another thread that others have had this working by just downloading the kernel sources and then using the installer.

Hi all. I had a similar problem. I'm using a custom kernel through ABS (and then pacman).
This is how I overcame the problem, though I can't say for sure this is the "right" way. I dl ed the source, then copied the contents of /usr/src/linux-2.6.4/include/asm-i386 (though this might be symlinked from include/asm) to the downloaded and unpacked source. Then it was just a matter of pointing /usr/src/linux to the downloaded source directory, what ever you called that, and nvidia-installer picked it up and compiled the module no problem. Hope this helps!

On second thoughts, you might need to rename /usr/src/linux-2.6.4 to /usr/src/linux-2.6.4.pac and have the complete source as /usr/src/linux-2.6.4. I think it's this directory that nvidia-installer looks in.

If anyone is still having problems, there is a detailed how-to on the wiki that works quite nicely.

Yes! thanks colnago, that howto told me everything i needed. For anyone else who might want it, the link is at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/...VIDIA%20Driver
now I can enjoy ut2003 in all of its graphical mayhem
:p