NVIDIA"

About this Howto

This howto will help you install the correct nVidia driver for your graphics card as well as troubleshoot common driver problems.

Determining your card model

nVidia has several driver series, each of which has different hardware support. To determine which driver you need to install, you'll first need to find your graphics card model.

If you don't know it, open a Terminal (Applications > System Tools > Terminal) and type:

/sbin/lspci | grep VGA

Installing the drivers

Fedora 10

Please remember that once the drivers are installed, they will configure your xorg.conf automatically and changes will take effect after a full reboot. There is no need to run nvidia-xconfig or other tools.

GeForce 6 and higher

yum install kmod-nvidia

GeForce 5 (FX series)

yum install kmod-nvidia-173xx

GeForce 2 through GeForce 4

yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx

Older

Unfortunately, nVidia has not yet released a 71.xx legacy driver compatible with Fedora 10.

Fedora 8 and 9

GeForce 6 and higher

yum install kmod-nvidia

GeForce 5 (FX series)

yum install kmod-nvidia-173xx

GeForce 2 through GeForce 4

yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx

Older

yum install kmod-nvidia-legacy

Special notes

x86_64 (64bit) users

If you wish to have 3D acceleration in 32bit packages such as Wine, be sure to install the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 package for your driver variant. For example, if you installed kmod-nvidia then you will require xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386, but if you install kmod-nvidia-96xx, you will need xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx-libs.i386.

Akmods

An akmod is a new type of package similar to dkms. As you start your computer, the akmod system will check if there are any missing kmods and if so, rebuild a new kmod for you. Akmods have more overhead than regular kmod packages as they require a few development tools such as gcc and automake in order to be able to build new kmods locally. If you think you'd like to try akmods, simply replace kmod with akmod in the instructions above and run them again. For example, kmod-nvidia-96xx becomes akmod-nvidia-96xx. Akmods are fully compatible with regular kmods, so you can switch between the two or even use both at once without any problems.

Troubleshooting

If you're experiencing problems with the drivers (in particular, lack of 3D after using nvidia-xconfig or nvidia-settings), try executing these commands:

nvidia-config-display disable
nvidia-config-display enable

This will re-configure xorg.conf for use with the RPM Fusion drivers.

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