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Glitter and Trauma

NVIDIA on SUSE 10.1

The information below is believed to be accurate but is provided with absolutely no guarantee or warranty, either express or implied. If you use any of the information that follows you do so entirely at your own risk.

Another issue with SUSE 10.1 was that the only way to install the proprietary NVIDIA or ATI graphics card drivers (needed for decent 3D acceleration) was to compile the modules. This page presents a more convenient method for installing and keeping NVIDIA drivers up to date (as that is the hardware I have so I have tried this). There is similar information for the ATI drivers at the ATI page at suse.de.

Compiling modules easy enough, but it does get a bit tiresome having to recompile on every kernel upgrade and especially if you forget and find yourself in runlevel three trying to remember where that driver is and have to bash on the command line interface like a monkey.

openSUSE logoNow, I understand the licensing issues that made Novell remove the old method of installing the drivers via Yast, but it was a hassle. So I was glad to learn, while perusing a SUSE mailing list, that SUSE now has kernel module packages on a repository at the NVIDIA server (strictly, NVIDIA has the modules). These are RPMs that can be installed as per normal, either manually or via Yast or one of those Zen/ZMD/libzypp/rug type things that Novell seem to like, or failing that Smart. The kernel relations are expressed as RPM dependencies so your graphics driver should get automatically updated with your kernel. This is cool and from an end user perspective is how things used to work in the SUSE 9.x series.

Anyway, you just need to add the repository at to Yast with ftp protocol, server download.nvidia.com and directory novell or, for Smart on the command line (all as one line):

smart channel --add nvidia type=rpm-md name="NVIDIA" baseurl=http://download.nvidia.com/novell

and then install x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-XXXXXX in which you replace XXXXXX with your kernel flavour (either default, smp or bigsmp - you can find out by running uname -r). After that, you should be able to sit back and let it all happen automatically in future. I did have an issue with Smart being unable to import the keys for the packages so had to install them with simple old rpm - hopefully that was just a keyserver issue and will sort itself out for next time. I've sworn not to venture into Yast/ZMD/Zen/Zypp hell again until openSUSE 10.2 (when I hope it will no longer be hell) so I haven't verified if that route works.

There's more on this, including manual install instructions at the NVIDIA page at suse.de. Be sure to scroll down to your correct version of SUSE. Check out the ATI page for corresponding info for ATI.