NVidia driver installation on Red Hat 9/KDE

A common complaint from Linux users is that the installation works fine until a game that requires accelerated video drivers is started. Several of the games that come with Red Hat are in this category. With the standard default drivers, "Tux Racer" and "Chromium" refresh about once a second and are unplayable.

With the correct drivers properly installed, however, it doesn't take much hardware to run these games. I recently installed the glx drivers for an 8MB NVidia AGP card into my main Linux box. Despite a very modest specification, it now runs Tux Racer very nicely. To get to that point I had to refer to a book ("Moving to Linux" by Marcel Gagne) and several websites for the various bits of information, so here is a summary.

Hopefully other Linux newbies will find it useful.

ctsnz (*at*) lycos (!dot*) com.

Hardware

Chaintech AIA2 motherboard, Socket 370 with onboard sound Celeron 433 CPU (66MHz bus, 128k cache)
NVidia 8MB AGP video card
256MB RAM PC133
40GB Samsung 7200rpm HDD Network card
Case; Pharaoh minitower (with poor ventilation, hence no overclocking)
15" generic monitor at 1024x768 pixels, defined as "Generic High Frequency Monitor 1024 pixels 70Hz" or whatever.

Software

Red Hat 9.0, full 5GB installation. KDE as default desktop.

Procedure

1. Logged in as root.

2. Tested for 3D support with this command; glxinfo | grep rendering The response should be; direct rendering: Yes (Thanks to Marcel Gagne for this tip) But on my machine the answer was "No". Additionally, "glxinfo" gave the response "XFree86-DRI missing on display:0.0".

I decided to download a new driver.

3. Googled for "3D driver NVidia", and downloaded the file "NVidia-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run" from the NVidia website, saving it to a dedicated folder in the "home" directory.

4. In a terminal, ran sh NVidia-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run.

However it turns out this won't work while Xwindow is running. So, to restart Red Hat 9 without X, I had to edit "/etc/inittab". I changed the line "id:5:initdefault" to "id:3:initdefault", saved, and rebooted.

The machine came up with a nice text login screen. I logged in as root, and re-ran the command sh NVidia-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run.

The installer worked, but when I restarted X and ran glxinfo I got the message 'extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0" '. So I googled for this phrase. Once again the forums came up with the answer.

4. Opening XF86Config-4 in Gedit, I found the "Modules" section and renamed the "Driver" entry from "nv" to "nvidia". Then rebooted and "startx".

5. In a terminal; glxinfo | grep rendering And this time the answer was direct rendering: Yes.