Installing nvidia drivers

I am new to openSUSE and just installed version 11 with KDE 4. I have been using Ubuntu and wanted to give openSUSE a shot.

I’m currently trying to get the nvidia drivers installed. Everything looked ok by default but there were some problems with the display not lining up nicely with the monitor so I figured I would install the nvidia drivers and maybe this would be fixed. I did the 1-click, for a new graphics card because my geforce fx5200 doesn’t fall under the legacy category according to nvidia legacy cards. I did ‘simple-ccsm’ and enabled desktop effects to fool around with these settings and it automatically disabled them giving a fatal error on the terminal. I believe it was this error I got from running sax2 -r later on:


(**) NVIDIA(0): Enabling RENDER acceleration
(==) NVIDIA(0): Video key set to default value of 0x101fe
(II) NVIDIA(0): Support for GLX with the Damage and Composite X extensions is
(II) NVIDIA(0):     enabled.
FATAL: Module nvidia not found.
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting ***
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(II) UnloadModule: "wfb"
(II) UnloadModule: "fb"
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.
	
Fatal server error:
no screens found
]

I restarted the system and x did not start automatically this time. So I tried to manually start x and got:


(==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sun Oct 12 18:49:42 2008
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"
(II) Module "ramdac" already built-in
FATAL: Module nvidia not found.
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting ***
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.

xinit:  Connection reset by peer (errno 104):  unable to connect to X server

xinit:  No such process (errno 3):  Server error.

I’ve also manually edited xorg.conf and change composite to off and I still get the above .xsession error. It would be great to get these desktop effects to work and I know it is possible because the HCL appears to confirm it. For now though I would just like to get x working. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Boot to level 3 by removing all comments in the boot line and then typing
3

in the boot line

at the login prompt login as root then type

sax2 -r -m 0=vesa

after reboot
that should get you back to a basic display

Next make sure you have these packages
gcc
kernel-source
make

here is the how to page
NVIDIA - openSUSE

some find they have to do it the hard way
NVIDIA - openSUSE

I ran into the same issue with nvidia FX5200.
I first tried the 1 button install on opensuse’s site, and it added the repos for nvidia kernels. In particular, I used the Geforce FX cards (5xxx) option.
I let Yast do its thing and then restarted X
It failed saying it failed to load the nvidia kernel module.
After much dinking around, trying to get it to work, I decided to download the kernel source in yast. When I did that, it also downloaded the missing nvidia rpm and installed. (nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-pae-…)
I restarted X and it works fine. (telinit 3 and then telinit 5).
Apparently the module didn’t get installed the first time.

To check if that rpm is installed, you can run:
rpm -qa|grep nvidia
You should get at least 3 lines, one being the missing module.

By the way, I also added the line in xorg.conf:

Option “NvAGP” “2”
since it is recommended on the opensuse nvidia page.
Also, I am running OpenSuse 11.1