I am not familiar with the various RedHat and Fedora tricks, but I have consistently had good luck with the official Nvidia installer. If it can't find the right driver, it compiles one.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

thanks! what version of Fedora do you have?

When trying to solve a problem, it frequently helps to verbalize even if one is talking to a broom!

None--I don't use the Redhat distros.
The Nvidia installer does not care about the distro--if necessary it compiles the driver to match your system.

I'm not sure I'm understanding all of the posts made on this thread but if someone is still having a problem where nvidia.ko can't be found I have a fix (It worked for me.) After installing the nvidia driver you have to copy the file /lib/modules/<your kernel>/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko to /lib/modules/<your kernel>/extra/nvidia/nvidia.ko (create the /extra and /extra/nvidia directories if necessary) because that is where the OS looks for the driver. Now whether to blame nvidia or fedora or even nvidia kmod is unknown to me. I usually install nvidia kmod after updating the nvidia driver (I use the installer from the official nvidia website) but it doesn't seem to change much of anything. This issue irritates me mildly but I can live with it (better than living with the M$ alternative!)

Well, you are of course free to install from whatever source you wish, whatever works, but the nvidia binary installer is strongly discouraged, and here's why: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xorg/3rdPartyVideoDrivers. I can personally attest to this problem, and the fact that it still exists - which you may never have, if you never switch video cards, nor attempt to compile software that requires the OpenGL stuff. Plus, you have to re-install it with each kernel update, and you're on your own to find the update if the driver itself is updated. I think nvidia does the best job of any hardware manufacturer out there to support Linux drivers for their products, and I applaud that effort and will buy their stuff because of that fact. Personally, I could care less whether or not they open the source code, so long as they continue to support Linux with (free) software drivers for their products. But that binary installer sux! You've been warned....

I don't have any idea at this point why yum failed to find those nvidia packages from Livna repo to re-install on your box. There are several things I can suggest at this point:
> check your yum repo files to make sure that they point to the right version and URLs for F8;
> install the driver from another 3rd-party repo such as FreshRPMs; their F8 nvidia driver comes in one package (named 'nvidia-x11-drv', plus nvidia-x11-drv-32bit if you have x86_64) and has no kmods to update - the kernel module is built at boot time against the booting kernel by the dkms utility; disadvantages: you must also install dkms, kernel-headers, and kernel-devel packages used to build kernel module(s); also, freshRPMs does not play nice with Livna, you must keep the FreshRPMs repo disabled;
> another 3rd-party that re-packages the nvidia driver is ATRPMs, and their nvidia driver suite is pretty much the same as Livna's, except the package names are different; again, the two repos don't play nice, you would need to keep ATRPMs disabled for regular updates, and manually update kmods when the kernel is updated.

Also, package-kit is not familiar to me - I thought that was a new thing for F9, I do not have any such thing on my F8 boxes. Which is why I suspect that yum is looking in the wrong place(s) for the packages.

Good Luck,
V

When trying to solve a problem, it frequently helps to verbalize even if one is talking to a broom!

I have no idea what you mean by that, but I'll take it as a cue to bow out of this thread without offering any further "advice", and wish you the best of luck with your problem.

V

GOOD GRIEF! my comment was in no way directed towards you! Hlingler

I appreciate your input!


I am currently wrestling with F9!

I was simply replying to the philosophy expressed by pixelany:

"It is not possible to rescue everyone who is caught in the Windows quicksand--Make sure you are on solid ground before trying."

Frequently in my life I've verbalized a question and thought of the answer before my sounding board could reply!

Verbalizing activates other brain paths! A prof of mine once remarked "correctly

formulating the question is critical towards solving the problem!

Thread derailed in obscure humor.....partially my fault, I guess.....

not your fault!

I am a conceptualist/philosopher!

I naturally assumed that your (very obscure and cryptic) post was directed at me, and since I had no idea what you meant, I thought it was best to write what I wrote....

In any case, I also was under the impression that you were originally having issues with F8, but now you say you're "currently wrestling with F9". If so, that explains the problem, I think: there are no F9 Livna driver packages for nvidia yet. You can enable the livna-testing-F9 repo and get them, but DRI won't work. It won't work in F9 if you use the nvidia binary installer either. It won't work until nvidia corp. updates the driver to work with the new F9 Xorg release. You can down-grade the whole F9 Xorg/X11 suite to F8 and get a patched/hacked nvidia driver to work, but then what's the point of upgrading? To then downgrade Xorg/X11? So you can upgrade it all again when nvidia fixes the driver?

There are plenty of places that you can find these hacks for F9 if you want, but I'm not sure at this point what releaase of Fedora or anything else you're 'wrestling with", so once again I don't know what to think....

V

apologies for jumping in on this thread but this site says a simple yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-32bit from livna works in fedora 9 just like yum install kmod-nvidia worked in fedora 8. i thought there would be no solution to the nvidia problems until the final release of xorg 7.4

has anyone had any success with this?

Take a look for yourself, and see if you can find those files on the list in the F9 Livna repo: http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/9/i386/

But they are in the F9 Livna testing repo folder: http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/testing/9/i386/

You can install them in F9 with:
yum --enablerepo=livna-testing install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

but they still won't work in 3D/DRI, and maybe won't work at all.

The link you posted is corrupt and won't load for me, but I'm going to guess that it's the same thread I alluded to: for F9, you can downgrade the whole Xorg/X11 suite to F8, then install patched/hacked F8 nvidia drivers that work with F9 kernel. If you're so inclined to do all that, and call it an "upgrade" to F9. Or, wait for fixed nvidia drivers.

V

thanks for the headsup hlingler the link was http://fedoraguide.info/index.php/Fedora9 and seemed to be a very official looking fedora 9 guide which seemed to make the whole yum install kmod-nvidia thing look way too easy in light of all the nvidia driver xorg hub-bub going on about all this.

i did see all the posts about downgrading your xorg (which i'd rather not do) but your post answered my question. what they are saying is basically false. i'm waiting for the xorg release so nvidia will fully support it and i can install fedora 9 as easily as i did fedora 8.

thanks