please help:
I have a default kernel on mandrake 9.2
After installing nvidia's new drivers v5336, I have to su to root and then run modprobe nvidia before I run startx. After that, I get the nvidia splash and everything works great. but, as soon as i reboot, mandrake can't startx until i manually modprobe nvidia.

anyone know how to fix this?

Have you edited your XF86Config as stated in the nvidia readme?

Or, if you have edited your XFree86 configuration file as per the instructions and it still doesn't work you should try autoloading the module on startup. I am not familiar with the Mandrake way of doing this but Debian has a list of modules to be loaded on boot in /etc/modules and Gentoo provides the same functionality with the /etc/modules.autoload.d/<kernelversion> files. It would surprise me if Mandrake didn't have a similar feature.


Håkan

Thanks so much for responding!
I have edited my XF86Config-4 file according to Nvidia's instructions. That was the easy part. I'm still not entirely sure how I even figured out to run that modprobe command. I just assumed that the error I was getting had something to do with the kernel module not working out quite right.

I knew there has to be some sort of text file somewhere that configures which kernel modules load on startup, but I had no idea what to look for. I'll tool around a bit and see what happens with what I can find in /etc/modules.

By the way, hw-tph...what is Gentoo...I've heard of it, but I'm not sure what it is.

Thanks again...I'll report back my results soon.

Look for a file in /etc/rc.d/ called "rc.modules". Go to the bottom and insert :

/sbin/modprobe nvidia

That should do it.

Ok...some stuff I found:

In my /etc folder, I cannot find a modules subfolder. I did, however discover a file called modules.conf which contained the following:

alias autofs autofs4
alias sound-slot-0 audigy
alias eth0 8139too
probeall scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
probeall usb-interface usb-uhci
alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
alias char-major-195 nvidia

Since that doesn't appear to have anywhere I can drop in a "modprobe nvidia" with other like comands, I just left it alone. Interesting that the last line DOES reference nvidia.

Ok, next file that caught my eye in the same directory was modules.devfs which I opened up and found the following:

# /etc/modules.devfs
# Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au> 24-MAR-2002
#
# THIS IS AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED FILE. DO NOT EDIT!!!
# THIS FILE WILL BE OVERWRITTEN EACH TIME YOU INSTALL DEVFSD!!!
# Modify /etc/modules.conf instead.
# This file comes with devfsd-vDEVFSD-VERSION which is available from:
# http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/
# or directly from:
# ftp://ftp.atnf.csiro.au/pub/people/r...VERSION.tar.gz

<my note: cut a bunch of stuff in between>

# Nvidia driver
alias /dev/nvidia* NVdriver

# Pull in the configuration file. Do this last because modprobe(8) processes in
# per^H^H^Hreverse order and the sysadmin may want to over-ride what is in the
# generic file
include /etc/modules.conf
<my note: end of that file>

So, here I again have a reference to the Nvidia driver/module/whatever.

Additionally, in my /boot/config-2.4.22-10mdk file, I found these lines:

#
# Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 DRI support)
#
CONFIG_DRM=y
# CONFIG_DRM_OLD is not set

#
# DRM 4.1 drivers
#
CONFIG_DRM_NEW=y
CONFIG_DRM_TDFX=m
CONFIG_DRM_GAMMA=m
CONFIG_DRM_R128=m
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=m
CONFIG_DRM_I810=m
CONFIG_DRM_I830=m
CONFIG_DRM_MGA=m
CONFIG_DRM_SAVAGE=m
CONFIG_DRM_SIS=m
CONFIG_DRM_VIA=m

Not sure if that is relevant or not.

So, thus far I haven't really made much progress. If you guys are tapped on ideas, I probably need to head over to Mandrake's forums...

Phorem...
you are my hero, man!
It worked like a charm.

Kinda cracks me up that Linux spits back a warning about "tainting" the kernel with non-opensource modules when it executes the modprobe nvidia...

Thanks again to all who took the time to respond!

No problem. Thanks for letting me know :-}