As you might be able to tell from the title of this post, I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle here. Through hummus. In the middle of winter. While I’m getting clawed back down the hill by a thousand lesbians. Tempted to join them, but ever vigilant.
After much cajoling and terminal commands, I’ve managed to get the real (REAL!) nVidia graphics driver up and running. While I was very excited for the ‘nouveau nVidia driver’ offered by default in Fedora 11, turns out this offers shit in the form of functionality with my graphics card. No desktop effects and no ability to change screen brightness? No thanks.
Hope eventually came in the form of a nice little .run file from nVidia’s site with the latest 64-bit drivers for my graphics card. Hooray, I thought! Sweet victory. But wait, I’ve never seen a .run file before…?
*some searching*
Twenty minutes of Googling and tinkering later, and I figure out how to: 1) run a .run file, 2) kill X, and 3) work my way through the driver installation. Which eventually failed, yes, but hey. Five more minutes of Googling later and I came across this fantastic little site. It gave me detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to add new repositories to yum (to which I’ve rather taken a liking), and from there getting the kmod-nvidia driver up and running. Easy as pie!
Some time later, I’m now running with full desktop effects (shiny) in Gnome and the ability to change the brightness of my screen. As far as other devices go, most things seem to work out of the box. Touchpad and sound controls are fully functional, as well as some of my Fn+ keys (such as screen brightness and mute). It’s been fun so far.
Next up: networking. Might need some help here…
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