Just a quick update: NVidia is fixed!
The 173 version of the driver has been released out of the beta stage. Now, my desktop effects are enabled, and things seem to be working very well!
Category: Fedora
NVidia Drivers for Fedora 9 Update
Ok, Fedora 9 was released yesterday, and the driver issue was not fixed.
As far as I can find on the Internet, Xorg 7.4 is supposed to come out this month (May 2008). An exact date is not mentioned anywhere. I read somewhere that NVidia will wait until Xorg releases the version before releasing their driver.
In the meantime, RandR is my goal. I want to take advantage of this new feature:
Xorg RandR 1.2 howto
Resources
Nvidia Drivers for Fedora 9
This will probably be fixed by the time Fedora 9 is released, but I had trouble getting the NVidia drivers to work.
I tried the rpm packages from AtRPMS, but I couldn’t get them to work. First of all, they forced me to downgrade to the kernel version 2.6.25-1 (I was at 2.6.25-8). Then, they didn’t install the nvidia-settings program and didn’t update xorg.conf. Finally, when I tried to update xorg.conf, XWindows wouldn’t start.
So, I decided to manually install the drivers.
The latest version that I found on the website was:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run
I had to update to the latest kernel release again because I couldn’t find drivers for the one that I was on. And, when I tried to compile it, I got an error. Looking in /var/log/nvidia-installer.log, I found:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c: In function
‘nv_flush_caches’:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c:364: error:
implicit declaration of function ‘global_flush_tlb’
make[4]: *** [/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.
o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/n
v] Error 2
make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2
NVIDIA: left KBUILD.
nvidia.ko failed to build!
make[1]: *** [module] Error 1
make: *** [module] Error 2
Then, I found an FTP link where later drivers were listed. I tried the 173.08 version. After manually deleting a broken link created by the previous install (/usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so), it compiled without a problem. But, I could not start the XWindows.
Here is what I got:
(EE) module ABI major version (0) doesn't match the server's version (1)
(EE) Failed to load module "glx" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
This server has a video driver ABI version of 4.0 that this
driver does not officially support. Please check
http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X
server with a supported driver ABI.
=================================================================
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so: undefined symbol: miZeroLineScreenIndex
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so
(EE) Failed to load module "wfb" (loader failed, 7)
(EE) NVIDIA(0): This video driver ABI is not supported.
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.
The best information that I can find so far, is that NVidia does not support the latest version of XWindows yet.
Conclusion
So far, I have determined I have to wait for NVidia to update their drivers. I am hoping they will have it done in the next couple of weeks only because Fedora 9’s release dates is in 14 days.