nvidia driver breaks with pretty much every F8 update

[David Kramer]

Niels Weber wrote:
> 2008/3/27, Mike Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com>:
>> Or you guys could dump Livna and use the package from freshrpms.net,
>>  which uses DKMS. It automatically rebuilds the module on a kernel change
>>  - even non-RPM kernel changes if you manually compile a kernel.
> 
> That's what I've also been doing on multiple machines and for years.
> It works really good. Since using that package, I've never had to
> worry about kernel or nvidia updates again.

Sorry to be off my own thread for a few days.  There's certainly been a 
lot of back and forth.  I'll try to address a bunch of points here.  I 
think this is a result of the fact the the Open Source community tends 
to invent 35 ways of skinning the same cat, because everyone wants to 
start on a different body part.

So I ended up installing directly from Nvidia.  One or two of the needed 
dependencies were tricky to track down, but otherwise it was very 
painless.  However, I haven't faced a kernel upgrade since I did it, so 
I'll have to see how smoothly that goes.  If it causes me problems, I 
may switch to DKMS, which sounds like a good solution if it works.

Paulo, thanks for pointing out the 586/686 thang.  In my experience, 
using packages marked as 586 or even 386 hasn't been a problem, but 
clearly with kernel modules, it needs to really match.

I'm anxious to try Gene's script, too.  However, I'm having trouble 
finding where that makefile is on my system.  I found
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.24.3-50.fc8-i686/drivers/video/nvidia/Makefile
but it only has 13 lines.  Is that it?

I have a unique opportunity in that both my server and my laptop are 
running F8 with nvidia cards, so I can try one way on one computer and 
another way on the other, and see how it goes.  For now, I simply don't 
do kernel upgrades on the server unless I see atrpms has the right 
nvidia drivers already, which is a hassle.  Maybe I'll try dkms there.

I *am* a little nervous about the lack of *recent* info on dkms.  I can 
see through "yum deplist nvidia-x11-drv | grep -i dkms" that dkms 
automagically gets loaded, and maybe I can accept that it "just works" 
but I'm not into "faith-based sysadmining".  I'm a Software Engineer by day.

Thanks all of you for all all your help.