RH8.0 and new driver, X won't work

[dfuse]

Hey, I just installed the new NVidia drivers, before I used the default nv driver. I use RedHat 8.0 on a Athlon and with a self-compiled kernel. Installing the driver went really fine, no errors whatsoever, but when I rebooted my pc to see if they worked, I couldn't start X. My screen flickered 4 times, always returning to text mode, and then I got an error message: Can't initialize NVIDIA kernel module. Luckily I made a backup of my XF86Config file. Anybody else had this problem or knows a solution?

This is the error in my XFree86.0.log:
(EE) [GLX]: Failed to add GLX extension (NVIDIA XFree86 driver not found)

All Nvidia initialisation before that went fine according to the log.

[dfuse]

Ok when I boot in console mode, and manually modprobe nvidia, x starts up. But how do I make it load automatically? In my modules.conf is a line alias char-major-195 nvidia, but is obviously not enough. What else can I do?

[bwkaz]

That is enough, if your distro does not use devfs. I don't know for sure whether RH 8 does or not, but I think it does.

Try changing the alias to alias /dev/nvidia* nvidia, saving the file, and running /sbin/depmod -ae as root. Then see if it'll autoload when you need it next.

[dfuse]

Hm, I don't know if it's good a solution, but I added modprobe nvidia to rc.local, and now it works, no errors at all.

[bwkaz]

It's an OK solution, as long as you don't mind the module loading on every boot.

[netboy]

I thought you only need to put

alias char-major-195 nvidia

into your /etc/module.conf or similar modprobe configuration file. Then the kernel will autoload the nvidia.o module when the X starts. Try it.

[dfuse]

As you can see in my previous post, it was already in modules.conf, but didn't work, that's kinda my problem.

bwkaz, what do you mean loading on every boot? The Nvidia should be loaded every time, not?

[bwkaz]

It should be loaded when you start up X, yes. However, if you're seeing kernel OOPSes or BUGs or whatever, and you want to report them to the linux-kernel mailing list, but you've had the nVidia driver loaded at all since boot, they will look at the "tainted" status of the kernel and say "sorry, we can't help you, you've loaded a proprietary piece of code into our kernel, and that could very well be causing the problem. If you can reproduce it without ever loading that module, then send us that bugreport instead".

So in normal usage, it doesn't matter much either way, but if you ever hit a kernel bug, it does.

[dfuse]

Ah okay, thanks, I'll just leave it there then, now that everything works.