driver auto-update script

[elanthis]

I've written a startup script for Red Hat systems that will automatically update your NVIDIA driver if a problem is detected with it.

The NVIDIA driver often becomes unusable when you install a new kernel or XFree86 packages from Red Hat updates, or source. This causes X to refuse to start, and requires some black magic that no user should ever need just to install a driver.

This script suffers from several problems, none of which *I'm* going to fix:
1) If you are running a kernel and don't have the headers/source for it, the script fails. This really can't be fixed by anyone other than the distros.
2) You can't (re)install the driver while X is running, even tho you can install new X packages while X is running. NVIDIA needs to fix this in their installer.
3) Every time the driver has to be reinstalled, the driver packages/source are redownloaded. NVIDIA's installer utility doesn't cache this download at all, they need to fix it in their installer utility.
4) This only works properly on Red Hat and Fedora Core systems. I know it works on RH9, it may or may not work on RH8.0 or earlier. Any hackers who want to make variants of this for other Linux OSs are free to do so.

To make this script perfected, the above needs to be taken care of, and NVIDIA needs to add this to their installer. ;-) (Note: their installer should also be 'fixed' to be runnable when X is running, since *requiring* a terminal to do anything is just stupid. A graphical installer wouldn't be bad either - they can do it for Windows, why not Linux? Ah well.)

Installation:
1) Make executable: chmod +x nvidia-driver
2) Put in init.d: cp nvidia-driver /etc/init.d/
3) Add to startup: /sbin/chkconfig --add nvidia-driver

(Note: these forums forced me to put a .txt extension on the file, remove that before installing.)

The script has no warranty; if it breaks your systems its your own damn fault for installing system scripts made by some unknown fool off the Internet. :P It does work for me on my Fedora Core box just fine, tho.

[elanthis]

*bump* - this thing really works folks. i'd like at least a little feedback, in hopes the next NVIDIA driver release will include it or something similiar. Makes life a lot easier. ;-)

[LordMorgul]

The download problem could be removed by using the .run installer file that contains the interface, with the following advanced options. I haven't added this to the script and used it yet, because I haven't needed to.

--ui=none --no-questions --accept-license -e --force-update -n

The use of all of them wouldn't be necessary but that is what I have used on the .run installer directly. The new version interface should only be downloaded if a newer version .run file is present on nvidia ftp.

[elanthis]

rock, thanks, I'll see how that works in my script and post an update later.