Compiling NVIDIA driver for -ntpl kernel

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, Christopher A. Williams wrote:

>> > If I may ask, why do I have to remove this? I've always used the NVIDIA
>> > driver, before fedora, and never had a problem.
>> If you don't remove the Mesa-libGL, you wont' be able to run the GL
>> screensavers. Look over past discussions regarding XFree, Nvidia, and
>> these in the list.
>
>Interesting - I was always under the impression that the latest NVidia
>installers updated the MesaGL libraries so that they did work with the
>GL screen savers.

They've never done that ever.  They delete Mesa with "rm" rather 
than removing the rpm package.  Then they plop their own 
proprietary libGL in it's place.  That's not what I'd call an 
update.  It's a complete replacement, done in a very hackish and 
non-rpm friendly manner.

The current XFree86-Mesa-libGL packages however provide multiple 
libGL's and Nvidia's hack doesn't hit them all, so you get Mesa 
still.


>The only error I have ever seen, even with the RSSS packages,
>was that some complained that DRI was not loaded. Since the
>NVidia drivers don't like DRI, I assumed this was normal.

This is because the Nvidia ugly hack to delete libGL only gets 
part of it.  The i686 TLS libGL is left, and if your system 
autodetects as being i686 compatible and compatible with TLS, 
that library will override anything installed in the general 
location (where Nvidia puts theirs).  As such, you end up using 
Mesa software libGL, and it tells you no DRI driver is available, 
which is correct.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat