[Triumf-linux-managers] Problem with elrepo nvidia drivers

[Kelvin Raywood]

After a bit I've a delay, I've tested the problems reported by Konstantin
with my instructions for installing nvidia drivers.  I've added a couple 
of extra lines to the instructions on the web-site and tested them on a 
fresh install on SL-5.5.

A couple more comments below.

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> Hello.
>
> As Kel nicely wrote it up here:
> http://it-services.triumf.ca/computing/linux/nvidia-x11-drv
> users of NVidia graphics cards can install the elrepo drivers
> as an alternative to manually downloading and installing
> the drivers from the NVidia web site.
>
> I tried it on a couple of machines and it worked (other than
> the need to reboot after installing the new packages - because
> the required /dev/xxx files were not created. An annoying bug,
> as the vanilla NVidia drivers from NVidia do not require a reboot).

The command "start_udev" creates the required device nodes.  This 
command is safe to run at anytime even though the udev process will 
usually already be running.  I added this command to the instructions on 
the web-site.

> But now yum updates started failing with complaint about a conflict
> with module-init-tools.
>
> To add injury to insult, this trivial failure also blocks all further
> yum updates, including the critical security updates, etc. (Perhaps
> the cron job should run "yum --skip-broken" by default).
>
> The reasons for this failure are documented here:
> http://elrepo.org/tiki/Update
> http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2010-May/000282.html
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=593504
>
> In the nutshell, there is some kind of mess-up with the way
> elrepo do kernel modules.

It's actually a mess-up by RedHat which will be fixed in RHEL-5.6 and, I 
assume, backported to SL-5.*.

> They recommend this workaround (installing their version of module-init-tools):
> yum --disablerepo \* --enablerepo elrepo update module-init-tools

I also added this command to the instructions on the web-site.

> This workaround seems to fix "yum update", enabling automatic update 
> of kmod-nvidia.

Yes.

--
Kel Raywood
Core Computing and Networking
TRIUMF