Where are the NVIDIA Video drivers?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

The procedure on the wiki is useless, as the links are badly broken.

First, download.nvidia.com no longer works by HTTP. All URLs are 302 redirected to http.download.nvidia.com, from where, no matter what you ask for, you will get a 404 Not Found response and a useless and misleading payload with a Content-Type of application/octet-stream (consisting of the following text: “File not found.” but you may have to jump through hoops to figure that out if you aren’t using IE, as IE gets special treatment.)

FTP seems still alive, so a modification of the Repository information in Yast may work.

Second, no files with “G01” (for the new series) exist anywhere anymore. Nor any files labelled with “-default” for kernel type. There’s still “-pae” and now there’s “-lockdep”. What is “lockdep”??

I made the mistake of clicking the 1-click install button. Yast went through some motions, declared success, and wedged my box on reboot: I got to login, entered userid and password, and lost everything – Dead keyboard, dead mouse, no consoles – except the almighty Reset button.

There is some sort of “nvidia” driver now installed on the system (I see the “tainted” messages zoom by early on in the boot sequence), but I can’t get rid of it, even if I manage to get some kind of init 3 login without X and run Sax2.

Do I have to reinstall Opensuse 11.0 to get a working system?

NVIDIA card: GeForce 6200 AGP. Board (PCChips M848A) has no onboard video at all.

2

log-in as normal on init 3, then, su to root & type this command

sax2 -r -m 0=nv

this will give you basic drivers for graphics. If that fails, substitute nv for vesa

Andy

3

> “File not found.” but you may have to jump through hoops to figure that out
> if you aren’t using IE, as IE gets special treatment.)

Probably because the Novell brain trust has decided to use a Redmond Made server
to better learn interoperability.

See “novell’s web server” thread in no.support-soapbox for their convoluted
logic for using a non-internet-standards complaint server to push bits to the
SUSE Linux Community.

Next, maybe we have to use IE & Silverlight to post/read the web forum?

4

Hi
This is my canned response for doing it the ‘Hard Way’ :slight_smile:

You can download the driver for your arch from;
Nvidia Unix Drivers

On the download page, check that your card is supported by the driver
your about to download by using the following command;


/sbin/lspci -nv |grep VGA |cut -f4 -d ":"

From the above output use the four numbers from the output to look
at the Supported Products List (on the left) to verify your card is
supported by the driver.

You may wish to ensure your system is up to date. The first command
refreshes the repositories, the second lists any updates, the third
will apply the updates.


sudo zypper ref
sudo zypper lu
sudo zypper up

If you don’t have the kernel source and tools etc installed then


sudo zypper in kernel-source linux-kernel-headers kernel-syms
sudo zypper in -t pattern devel_basis devel_C_C++

Press ctrl+alt+F1 and login as your user :slight_smile:


su -
init 3

cd to the Nvidia Unix Driver you downloaded


sh NV*.run -q
sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia
init 5 && exit
ctrl+alt+F1
exit
ctrl+alt+F7

The ctrl+alt+F7 gets you back to the GUI (X session).

Now after a kernel update, you don’t need to run the sax2 command, just
the others to get to run level 3, rebuild the driver and exit.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.0 x86 Kernel 2.6.25.18-0.1-default
up 1 day 21:29, 2 users, load average: 0.19, 0.10, 0.14
GPU GeForce 6600 TE/6200 TE - Driver Version: 177.80

5

That the NVIDIA repositories can’t be browsed over http is normal, it’s mentioned on Additional YaST Package Repositories - openSUSE as well

Note that Index of /opensuse and Index of /novell repositories are not browsable with a web browser but their ftp:// equivalents are.

6

It may be mentioned but this is definitely not “normal”. Which benighted cretin decided to reference them by HTTP, of all things? If the server answering on port 80 does not talk HTTP, then a HTTP URL makes absolutely ZERO sense, because, among other things, one does not need a “browser” to “talk” HTTP.

The 'net is going to hell in a handbasket.