I've got a question that I'm sure you Linux experts will answer with no effort at all, but for someone such as myself it's driving me crazy.
I built a Suse11.1 system (KDE4.1) recently, with an old nVidia Geforce 2 GTS card in it (I think...something very close to that if I'm wrong). Anyway, the KDE interface works, but the response time is annoyingly slow due to the generic video driver being used and I'd like to load the appropriate driver to speed things up.
I went to the nVidia website, eventually finding my way to
this page where I was able to download a .RUN file containing the new driver. Sweet. However, nVidia recommended that before I install the driver I check out
this page first. Okay, fine.
The how-to page tells me to add DOWNLOAD.NVIDIA.COM into my repositories list. Done. Then it tells me that I should go to YAST > SOFTWARE > SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT to install the driver, at which point the appropriate nVidia package will be autoselected (if the card is supported).
Now yes, I realize that I'm supposed to be doing this outside the GUI, but I wanted to check YAST from within the GUI first, because the last thing I want to do is turn it off, find out that there's no driver, and then lose the GUI completely (again, probably easy to turn back on, but I have no idea how).
Here's the weird part: when I fire up Software Management, despite what the documentation says, there are no nVidia drivers selected automatically. This may be because my card isn't supported, but I think they're leaving something out. The reason I think that is that it makes no sense to me that Software Management would randomly choose to pull up a video driver versus any other driver, software update, software app, etc, just by launching it. In the past I always had to search for what I wanted to install. Nvidia's documentation suggests Software Update will magically know that I want a video driver and will autoselect it. I don't think so. So what am I missing?
Oh, one last question: if I return to the first nVidia page, there's the .RUN driver file present. Am I supposed to download it? If so, why bother with Software Management, since (as I understand it) it's used to install software from repositories and not from a local hard drive. And if I DO have to use Software Management to install local software apps, then how do I direct it to the location of my downloaded driver?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give. As you can tell, I'm pretty green with Linux, and even simple things like driver loads have got me stumped.
Thanks,
Bob