I am a total newbie so please excuse me if this plea appears to be simple

I own a toshiba laptop with a nvidia geforce 4 graphics card and a toshiba internal 1024/768 monitor and redhat linux 9

I downloaded and installed the latest nvidia driver and everything was working well

My system is set up to automatically check the redhat linux website for program update. An update was dowloaded and installed today and I now find that if I select the most recent download from my boot menu, the system will not go thru to the GUI but gives me an error message and then goes to a command prompt

A frien suggested that I will need to recompile something but I have no idea what or how to do it

Although I am pretty good with Windows and DOS I am a total newbie with Linux

If I select the orinally innstalled Linux verion from my boot up menu, everything works fine. It is only when I select the most recent update that I have the problem

Please help

Sid

Every time you upgrade the kernel, you will need to reinstall the nvidia drivers. I find it best to keep a copy of the /usr/X11/XF86Config file once you have your display working properly.

Boot your machine up using the new kernel and allow it to run through to a login, then login as root.

Change directory to wherever your nvidia driver script is kept and run the script.

Don't allow it to download modules from the internet, as you want it to recompile the modules currently on your system.

Once the nvidia script has finished, your system should be working again and the old login should fail.

You can delete the old boot from the /etc/grub.conf file at this point.

This happens every time you upgrade the kernel, so that's why I keep a copy of the /usr/X11/XF86Config once I've got it working.

Dunk

Thank you very much Dunk.
When I try to re-install the nvidia driver I get a series of messages

1 No precompiled kernel interface was found to match your kernel. Would you like to download a kernal interface from NVIDIA ftp site

When I respond 'yes' I get the following message

2 No matching precompiled kernel interface was found this means that the installer will need to compile a kernel interface for your kernel

When I say OK

3 Unable to find the kernel header files for thehe currently using kernel. On redhat linux systems make sure you have the kernel-source rpm installed

Please help I am at a complete loss and thoroughly confused

Sid,

I would look into what packages you have installed on your machine. It looks like you only have the kernel binary files (the ones that actually run the machine) and not the source files too.

I think the nVidia script needs the source files installed (I know I have them installed) to recompile the new graphics module.

Once you install the source modules for the kernel, ensure they are upgraded by running the up2date program.

Then boot into the new kernel.

When it asks if you want to download files from the nvidia site reply "NO"

Then let it recompile the new kernel modules for you using the new source files you installed.

I'm pretty sure that should fix things for you.

Dunk