Tuesday, April 10, 2012

HowTo: Install NVIDIA drivers on CentOS 6.2 / SL 6.2

By default, RHEL clones such as CentOS 6.2 and SL 6.2 assign the nouveau X11 driver to NVIDIA graphics card. nouveau is a fine driver, miles away from the old nv; however if you want 3D performance (or a compiz powered desktop) you'll need to turn to NVIDIA and its closed source drivers.

CentOS official repositories don't contain packages for NVIDIA closed source driver so one needs to add a third party repository that has the driver available, such as the ELRepo repository.

Adding the ELRepo consists of importing the public GPG key and installing the repository:
# rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org 
# rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm 
Having added the repository we can finally install the driver (yum pulls nvidia-x11-drv as a dependency) and reboot:
# yum install kmod-nvidia
# reboot
Know Issues
By installing NVIDIA closed source drivers, the plymouth graphical boot will no longer be available. In other worlds, the pretty CentOS and SL logos on a black background will be replaced by a bottom horizontal progress bar.
at

4 comments:

  1. toracat13 April, 2012 17:21

    If you'd like to get the plymouth stuff, follow the instructions on:

    http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia

    Section "Plymouth graphical boot no longer available on EL6"

    ReplyDelete
  2. tangram15 April, 2012 17:46

    Hi!

    Thanks for the input. I'll be updating the post on a new future on how to re-enable plymouth including how probe for graphics card supported modes.

    If I have the time I'll also explain how to remove NVIDIA closed sources drivers and re-enable nouveau drivers.

    Best regards.

    ReplyDelete
  3. aurfalien23 April, 2012 20:22

    Hi,

    After installing kmod-nvidia and upon reboot, I get some errors in my messages file;

    kernel: NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000 GPU installed in this system is
    kernel: NVRM: supported through the NVIDIA 96.43.xx Legacy drivers. Please
    kernel: NVRM: visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
    kernel: NVRM: information. The 295.40 NVIDIA driver will ignore
    kernel: NVRM: this GPU. Continuing probe...
    kernel: NVRM: No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!
    gdm-binary[2013]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.548291 seconds
    gdm-binary[2013]: WARNING: GdmLocalDisplayFactory: maximum number of X display failures reached: check X server log for errors

    And in Xorg.0.log;

    [ 37.145] (EE) NVIDIA: Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module. Please check your
    [ 37.145] (EE) NVIDIA: system's kernel log for additional error messages.
    [ 37.145] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
    [ 37.145] (II) Unloading nvidia
    [ 37.145] (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module-specific error, 0)
    [ 37.145] (EE) No drivers available.
    [ 37.145]
    Fatal server error:
    [ 37.145] no screens found
    [ 37.145]

    I am using a GeForce vs a Quadro.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks in adance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. tangram23 April, 2012 21:32

    Hi aurfalien!

    kmod-nvidia driver is the current release and supports NVIDIA GeForce 6 series GPUs onwards.

    The kmod-nvidia-96xx driver supports GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 series GPUs which appears to be your case.

    You can check you graphics card by running lspci | grep VGA.

    So if you've imported the GPG and added the repository, just run yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx as root.

    Regards.

    ReplyDelete