Nvidia native drivers or livna drivers

[ramy.m]

Just was curious which is better to use the drivers provided by nvidia or the build ones on livna

[leadgolem]

The ones on livna are precompiled and tend to set themselves up correctly with minimal effort. The nvidia ones take a little more work to setup, and are harder to remove if they get messed up. I prefer to use the livna drivers.

That being said, I would recommend running "yum clean all" before you install the driver from livna. At the moment, yum will occasionally let you install a package without it's dependencies, this can be messy with a video driver.

FYI: There seems to be a bug in the current main nvidia driver when using compiz or beryl. This bug can remove the titlebar on your windows after an x restart. The bug shows up regardless of where you get the driver. The nvidia 96xx driver does not appear to have the same problem.

[glennzo]

I've always had good luck with the drivers from Livna. I basically install them and restart x. It's been just that easy in my case.

[leadgolem]

Lately I've had problems just restarting x after installing nvidia drivers. Kept getting the message that xserver could not start etc... Rebooting the system solved that problem.

[glennzo]

I agree. I probably should have said to reboot instead of trying to restart x. Still, very simple.

[ramy.m]

the issue is i am now using the native drivers provided by nvidia i felt lucky because after updating the kernel it was simple to reinstall them again and didn't have to wait for livna to build the drivers for the new kernel
and i wondered why people are keeping using livna drivers and get stucked when no builds are available for the new kernels, i thought there maybe something special about these drivers but it seems not

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by ramy.m

the issue is i am now using the native drivers provided by nvidia i felt lucky because after updating the kernel it was simple to reinstall them again and didn't have to wait for livna to build the drivers for the new kernel
and i wondered why people are keeping using livna drivers and get stucked when no builds are available for the new kernels, i thought there maybe something special about these drivers but it seems not

Well you could use the DKMS based nvidia driver from freshrpms ( no waiting for a kmod or re-running the nvidia installer )

http://moonshine.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=414




Why wait for Livna when you can rebuild the nvidia-kmod.src.rpm yourself

[Seve]

Originally Posted by ramy.m

Just was curious which is better to use the drivers provided by nvidia or the build ones on livna

Hello:
Not sure there is a right or wrong answer to your question.
Although, there has been some issues with installing the binaries from nVidia in the past. Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)
I have no idea if this is still the case or not ?
Regardless, the rpm packages from both livna and freshrpms have been proven to be very good.
The updated kmod-nvidia [livna] is usually available within a day or so. The package from freshrpms is not tied to the kernel, so that is not an issue.
Before livna began supplying the rpm package, the package from nVidia was the only choice.

Since both livna and freshrpms currently provide the rpm package, I not sure what advantage installing the binaries from nVidia would be ?

Certainly, for most folks and especially new users, using the rpm packages is the way to go.

Seve

[leadgolem]

The last several times I've updated, I noticed that kmod-nvidia is usually available within about 4 hours of the kernel release. I can wait a few hours before I install a new kernel.