Josh Olson’s Blog

Update: The current (173.14.09) stable NVIDIA driver works with Fedora 9. The following information is outdated and kept for archival purposes.

The latest stable NVIDIA drivers will not install when using the version of X.org that is distributed with Fedora 9. I was able to use NVIDIA’s beta 172.08 display drivers after a few manipulations.

Version 172.08 does not support ABI, so I placed the following in /usr/bin/startx

defaultserverargs="-ignoreABI"

I also commented the following from /etc/X11/xorg.conf

# Load "glx"

Fedora 9 and NVIDIA Drivers x86_64 Instructions

Download the appropriate beta driver

$ wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/
Linux-x86_64/173.08/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

Run the installer

$ sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

Edit /usr/bin/startx (for runlevel 3 users) and add the following:

defaultserverargs="-ignoreABI"

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment the following:

# Load "glx"

I upgraded my primary workstation to Fedora 9 this week. Although the upgrade was mostly uneventful, I did struggle with a few annoyances.

The latest revision of openbox lacks a specific functionality that’s vital to my coherent work flow. It lacks the ability to hold down the left mouse button on the title bar, and use the scroll wheel to migrate the currently held window to the next or previous desktop. It was easy to roll back to a previous version from the Fedora Core 6 Extras repository.

Another annoyance is that konsole removed the –noxft switch in their latest revision, this allowed me to prevent my terminals from having anti-aliased fonts. I use the font Terminus (highly recommended, by the way) within my terminals, and having that anti-aliased is just unacceptable. I could just disable anti-aliasing across all applications, but then my browser and mail client would look terrible. I was able to solve this issue with ~/.fonts.conf.

The last issue I had was with pulseaudio. Sound was very soft, even with the speakers and alsamixer set to 100%. I removed alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, and things started functioning normally.

I tried KDE again this week, and was dissapointed (as usual.) It was quite sluggish, and seemed very kludged together. Maybe someone will develop a feature-full window manager that doesn’t require big iron to run before I’m a gray-beard. They would then have to convince me that it is indeed better to have all that eye candy, yeah right.