Some NVIDIA Basics

[caf4926]

Some NVIDIA Basics

A considerable number of issues have been raised in the Forum regarding the install of the NVIDIA driver. You need to determine which version of the driver you need, something which will depend on the age of your video device. This basic guide assumes you are using a relatively new graphics device (eg; Geforce 6 or higher).
There seems to have been instances where the OneClick installer adds in all kinds of unnecessary extras.


The following two images are colour coded
Red = PAE kernel
Yellow = Default kernel


These are the the most likely options, as you will probably be using either one or the other. They are basically the same except the PAE addresses RAM in excess of 3GB on 32bit systems.
So, if you have a PAE kernel select all packages with Red marks
If you have Default kernel select all packages with Yellow marks





Generally I would recommend adding the repository manually:
From here: Additional YaST Package Repositories - openSUSE

Then just Open Software Management, go to the repository filter - then to nvidia and check the x11-video-nvidiaG02...

Adjust as necessary according to the images above.




There is a help page here:NVIDIA - openSUSE
Which discusses install in more detail.

[FeatherMonkey]

One of the big problems I'm seeing and can't check but is it seems the one click can sometimes bring in another kernel and the nvidia packages to go with it(Or the for the wrong kernel), then many users don't really know what kernel they are using. Many times they have default and pae installed.

I've taken to getting the info directly with ..
zypper se -i nvidia kernel ; uname -a

(Not going to get involved, but I think we should educate and bug report to get the usage correct(Allow install and no add repo by default) i.e Disable after enabling in the majority of cases. Rather than discourage as many new users are having Suse promoted to them because of this 1click ability)

[urisk1323]

Thank you. That is all I need. Specifically, I had the pae kernel installed and was trying to install the the default kernel drivers.

Thanks for your help.

[NarahariBabu]

1-Click instal of nVidia was working like a charm till driver version was 175 or so. Now with later versions, 1-Click installs later version of Kernel and boot loader would still be pointing to old kernel only. There by, GUI never loads. Me being a linux novice, found hard way to realise that boot loader has to point to the latest kernel.

This happened with 11.0 ( 6 months ago) and repeated now with 11.1 (last week). This time i had become wiser to modify Boot Loader right after installing nVidia drivers.

Mods please delete this if this is not the right thread to post.

Regards
NarahariBabu