[SLUG] NVidia kernel module

[Paul Teasdale]

I have just been getting very frustrated with the official NVidia graphics 
driver for Linux. I was just about at the point of posting a question onto 
the SLUG mailing list for help when I discovered what the problem was. I have 
posted this message in case it may help someone else.

A few weeks ago I complied the latest NVidia driver and installed it on my 
laptop. After an amount of random time the laptop would lock up and the only 
way to recover was to power off and restart. At this point I decided to go 
back to the old graphics driver which works fine.

So I compile and install the old graphics driver and all is back to normal 
until I reboot that is. After rebooting and attempting to startx I get the 
error message that the NVidia driver can't be initialised. After a recompile 
and install all was fine again until next reboot.

To cut a long and frustrating story short the latest NVidia graphics driver 
had changed my modules configuration file (/etc/modules.conf) from:

alias char-major-195 NVdriver

to

alias char-major-195 NVidia

but the old installation did not change it back to NVdriver. Therefore when I 
complied and installed the old NVidia driver it was also loaded into memory 
by 'make install' until I rebooted. After reboot NVidia could not be loaded 
because my older copy of the NVidia driver is actually called NVdriver.

After chaging the module configuration file back to NVdriver all works fine 
again.

Hopes this helps someone at sometime.

Regards,

Paul.