Sunday, February 13, 2005

dkms nvidia driver rpm installing

So Dell shipped me this new dell machine running RHEL3 with a nvidia (pci express quadro nv 280 mumble something). Having reinstalled (with Athena) the task was to get the nvidia driver working again. Interesting things:

  • The rpm they gave me seemed to have been precompiled for 64bit linux.
  • It came with version 6624, thought the newest at support.dell.com was 6105
  • Whatever that 6105 package was from dell, I regret having tried it

Anyway, the right thing to do was to use /dell/source/dell-nvidia-6624.1dkms.src.rpm. First be root, then rpmbuild --rebuild it, then rpm -Uvh to install the rebuilt rpm. All the proper DKMS stuff gets triggered (because I had installed dkms first).

Twinview works happily as advertised, and I now have 3200x1200 display on two CRTs.

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