Re: Another query on NVIDIA under linux 2.4.20

[Marc Wilson <msw@cox.net>]

On Wed, Jan 01, 2003 at 10:46:57PM -0600, Larry Hunsicker wrote:
> When we reboot, the NVIDIA drivers are never loaded, and NVIDIA won't
> run, until we reinstall the NVIDIA kernel by hand.

This is because you you didn't use the source packages, like we all told
you, and instead built from the nVidia tarball.  Nothing got installed in
your /etc/modules to tell the kernel what to load when something went
looking for the kernel module... so nothing gets loaded.

> I suppose that we could force the loading of NVIDIA using modprobe
> somewhere in one of the inti.d files.  But it would have seemed that
> this should have been done by the NVIDIA kernel install process or
> kmod.

Again, kmod doesn't know what to load.  I don't know if nVidia's tarball
would have modified /etc/modules.conf or not... even if it did, the next
time anything ran update-modules, the changes would have gone away.  The
only way to make sure your changes persist is to do it in this way:

Create a file in /etc/modutils.  Name it 'nvidia-kernel'.  In it, put the
following:

$ cat /etc/modutils/nvidia-kernel
alias /dev/nvidia* nvidia
alias char-major-195 nvidia

And as root, run 'update-modules'.

That will take care of the auto-load problem.  The source deb does this and
suffixes the filename with the name of the kernel it goes with as well.

-- 
 Marc Wilson |     Bachelor: A man who chases women and never Mrs. one.
 msw@cox.net |