Nvidia driver woes + Mesa

[Andy Ritger]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Mike A. Harris wrote:

> Andy Ritger wrote:
> >>>         If the extension is specific to a vendor, then of course you will 
> >>>have to stick with that vendor for the future (or dump the extension you 
> >>>are depending on).
> >>
> >>Nvidia have some packaging issues about trashing existing libraries that
> >>makes their stuff a PITA to remove but their compatibility is extremely
> >>good and I've not seen library issues between Mesa and the Nvidia guys.
> > 
> > 
> > By necessity, the NVIDIA installation tool moves conflicting OpenGL
> > libraries to a temporary directory (so that those libraries aren't
> > picked up at load time, instead of the NVIDIA libraries).  To restore
> > these backed up libraries and remove the NVIDIA libraries, you
> > can run:
> 
> It isn't necessary though.  The rpm packages available in 
> www.livna.org's rpm repository install the Nvidia proprietary driver 
> into an rpm based OS in a clean manner that does not rename, move, or 
> delete the OS supplied libGL or other files, and configures the X server 
> to properly use the Nvidia supplied X server modules, etc.
> 
> I just wanted to point this out, to show that it isn't necessary to 
> mangle the OS supplied files that are managed by rpm.  It's by choice 
> rather than necessity.  ;)

Thanks for pointing out livna.org, Mike.  I've looked at their
packaging scheme briefly in the past, but I'll take another look.
NVIDIA has had bad luck in the past with solutions that try to be
too smart about loader search order, but if it has worked well for
the livna.org guys then it's worth another try.

Thanks,
- Andy