We are now going to do a series of
boring technical notes that nevertheless fulfill a more noble
purpose.
Those of us who are interested in doing
or fostering independent production with computers and computer
animation have a lot to be grateful for with Linux, particularly with
Centos/Redhat Linux. It is stable, scalable, various applications
work with it and it is remarkably Unix-like for something that isn't
Unix.
And it has so far avoided the insane
Linux-of-the-day bullshit of Ubuntu, praise Allah.
But we do not live in a perfect world
and a well-tempered Linux is going to be running the NVIDIA device
driver with a solid, respectable NVIDIA graphics card and we are
going to discuss why and then dive into the crazy shit you have to do
to make it all work.
The only manufacturer out there that
really supports Linux is NVIDIA, in spite of what you may have heard
of Linus fingering NVIDIA. His frustration is real, but it is
bullshit. For a variety of reasons NVIDIA is not able to put their
device drivers in the open source because it contains proprietary
information they just do not want to give their competitors. So that
means that certain purists can not include it with the standard
distributions. That means you have to install it yourself.
With Centos / Redhat, one also has the
option of using the so-called "nouveau" driver which
supposedly supports NVIDIA. I have crashed my system so many times
using the nouveau driver that I do not recommend you use it for
serious work. Since I also do things like CUDA/GPU development, it
isnt a serious option anyway.
So we are going to install the NVIDIA
driver, and it is a little wacky to do so. There are three
fundamental reasons why installing the driver is so convoluted and
they are (a) you can not install a graphics driver if you have
graphics running, (b) in particular you have to get rid of the
nouveau driver and its non-trivial to do so, and finally (c) you have
to be able to "compile" the NVIDIA driver against your
current Linux and that means having the development environment
loaded.
There is one more reason too that this
note was written. There is so much craziness on the Internet about
what to do with graphics drivers that I am adding my own opinion to
the mix, along with clear instructions.
In order to follow these steps, you need to know how to do basic Unix/Linux things like ls, cd,
chmod and so forth, have the su/root password, be able to use a text
editor like vi that can work without X running, have access to the
Internet, be able to use a web browser to download files, and be
able to follow instructions.
In this post, I am just going to
outline what you will have to do to install the driver. In the next
post, I will fill in the details of how to actually do these things.
So hold on everybody, here we go!
1. Are you already running the NVIDIA
driver? How can you tell for sure?
2. Install the development tools.
3. Figure out the model of your
graphics card.
4. Figure out if your Linux is 32 or 64
bit
5. Download the driver from NVIDIA.
6. Put that driver someplace easy to
get to, like /tmp and make it executable.
Now we get into the more tricky stuff.
7. Change /etc/inittab to bring the
system up at level 3
8. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 1
9. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 2
10. Reboot
11. Log in as root
12. Verify the location of the system
kernel libraries
13. Install the Nvidia driver (say yes
to compatibility mode if you are asked)
14. Restore the /etc/inittab runlevel
to 5
15. Reboot the system
We are almost done, hang in there!
16. As su, run "nvidia-xconfig"
17. Run "nvidia-settings" and
save your work.
My goodness, that was annoying wasn't
it?
The next post will have the mere
details of how you actually do these things. The only thing really,
really arcane is the blacklist of Nouveau.
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