NVidia driver fails after yum update
 

Because I hadn't seen the sticky, I'd installed the nvidia drivers from nvidia's own website. Everything was running fine, but after I ran #yum update, the X server failed to start and had to rebuild it's configuration - and of course, I'm back to using the default Vesa driver, becaues the Nvidia driver is the problem. (This has happened every time I make major update to my system). Now, the nvidia package fails to compile the kernel interface module, and this:I've since run #nvidia-installer --uninstall
and tried both yum and Nvidia's package, but they fail the same as before.

I'd like to have my NVidia driver back, so I can go back to trying to get my microphone to work (may have to post a different thread on this later). Also, this time I'd like to use an RPM like the sticky says I should.

All (read: most) drivers in linux are kernel modules, so when you update your kernel (as yum obviously did) you need to update your driver. Judging by the error from yum the Fedora guys don't have a new nvidia driver in the repos yet and if you'd done some searching you'd have discovered that you need to patch the official nvidia driver to work with the 2.6.16 kernel.

Go find the patch at nvnews and you should be fine, in future maybe have a read over what yum is installing and if it looks like something major, run it passed Google to see if there are any current problems people are experiencing so you know what you're in for.

The instructions here:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=62021

Worked for me - unfortunately, it's a non-rpm install. Also, the nvidia driver turns my text tiny, but that's a trivial issue.

Check the nvnews forums, the newer nvidia drivers calculate DPI differently to the old ones which can cause this, it's simple to fix.

Well, it turns out that the patched driver I had doesn't work right in 3d - glxgears works fine, but running an actual 3d program in cedega results in very strange behaviour - World of Warcraft's login screen was completely unusable, and WCIII, while workable, had strange and extremely ugly errors.

After I reinstalled the operating system to make sure everything was clean, I figured out that they did, in fact, have an rpm'd nvidia driver for this kernel - but I hadn't configured yum to look at the livna repository.

However, now that I've installed their rpm, things are behaving strangely. And cedega's system information autodetect doesn't see my video card at all. Again, everything that isn't 3d works fine - in fact, now the text is normal sized, as if I'm still using the vesa driver.

To confirm that the nvidia package was the source of this problem, I removed it with yum. Sure enough, glx gears is now running (about 750 fps). With the nvidia package from livna, glx gears would fail even if I ran the provided command line utility to disable the nvidia driver.

Your initial post seems to suggest that you're using the 1.2069 kernel in FC5. If you run a yum upgrade you'll notice that the latest kernel is 1.2080. For that kernel, livna has a kmod-nvidia rpm available which installs and runs with few problems. (I, in fact, had none.)

I'm not running in FC5 at all - I'm running FC4, as indicated after the underscore at the end of my kernel version.

Opps! My bad.:cry:

Well, in that case, check livna for the nVidia RPM for that kernel.

Edit: The FC4 nVidia modules are, I believe, called kernel-module-nvidia-`uname -r`, but they may have changed to the newer kmod-nvidia-`uname -r` form.

livna's nvidia package for FC4 still uses the kernel-module-foo format. When I installed it as a user through a shell (with #su for permissions) the result was the error in post 5 of this thread. Uninstalling and then reinstalling with root as the login shell produces a working driver. Well, working so far - glx gears is getting between 6.6k - 7.k fps.

When you install the livna nVidia driver, you should automatically have installed the nvidia-glx service, which is run during the logon. That service just invokes nvidia-config-display to make sure that the glx stuff is set up properly.

Did you reboot before the glx errors in your post 5 occurred? Did the nvidia-glx "service" start properly?

Have you run /usr/sbin/nvidia-settings to see if there's anything of interest there?

After several full system reinstalls, I'm back to kernel 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 and the error in post 5. The driver I had in post 9 created errors very much like those I described at the top of post 5 (excepting that WoW was, like WCIII, animated and therefore technically usable).

nvidia-settings appears to be able to configure only its own behaviour - it doesn't actually do anything to anything else.

EDIT: nvidia-settings does work if I have the nvidia driver on - of course, it's nigh-impossible to read anything it says.

It does give me this error when I run it from command line: One thing I noticed is that my xorg.conf has the driver set to "vesa" - but if I change it to "nvidia" manually, my colorscheme is all wrong.

Also, I think I see why this was happening: "With the nvidia package from livna, glx gears would fail even if I ran the provided command line utility to disable the nvidia driver." - I was rebooting to test, and their bootscript was automatically turning nvidia back on!

EDIT: Yep, running "# nvidia-config-display disable" and then ctrl+alt+backspace sets things back to normal vesa driver functionality - glxgears works, but gets 500fps

A little more testing shows that the nvidia-config-display script swaps this:
driver "nv"
for this:
driver "nvidia"
but if the driver entry is anything other than nv or nvidia, it's stymied (changes some other things, though)

I also got the glxinfo from when the nvidia driver is loaded and giving me strange colors into a text file.

I've updated to the 2.6.16-1.2069_FC4 kernel and getting the nvidia driver for that from livna, I've come back to this.

But!

By passing the -opengl option to cedega, I've eliminated this problem in WCIII. This pretty much proves that Cedega, specifically their Direct3d emulation, and not the nvidia driver from livna, is at fault.

yum install kmod-nvidia-1.0.8774-1.2.6.17_1.2174_FC5
 

The following link contains the livna rpms...
http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/5/i386/
... so in my case "yum update kernel" upgraded to the 2.6.17 kernel and then...
"yum install kmod-nvidia-1.0.8774-1.2.6.17_1.2174_FC5" installed the nvidia drivers.

Hth