Switching from ATI to NVidia

[ravalox]

I am running SUSE 9.0 and I ran the instructions for uninstalling the radeon drivers (rpm -e fglrx...) and after this I powered down, replaced the radeon 9700 with a geforce4 4600. Now I rebooted fully expecting X not to work. However, after I ran the Nvidia installer X still will not go live. Sax2 operates just dandily, no XFree86 however, even after a reboot. Anyways, does anyone out there have any relevant experience to explain what to do short of reformat?

[Antti]

Did you switch Driver "fglrx" to Driver "nvidia" from /etc/X11/XF86Config?

[kmare]

edit your XF86Config in /etc/X11
remove anything it is ati specific (mostly in the device section).
Then try to run (after entering the init 3 mode) the nvidia installer. Make sure there is "nvidia" in the section "device". It will certainly work. At least it did for me. Btw I don't think you actually need to reformat your disk.

PS: read the README file that comes with the driver for available options.

[ravalox]

Here's some weirdness, the XFConfig to my knowledge doesn't mention fglrx, but it is still trying to load it. I did the uninstall on fglrx (rpm -e fglrx) and it is still referenced somehow. It is properly configured in XF86Config to my understanding, but somehow it is called in a later stage. I could be wrong on this point though, I had to scan XF86Config with mine eyes instead of searching programmatically. But somehow fglrx is called and it drives my X into an error.

[Antti]

Check your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. It's basically the same file as XF86Config, and in fact, you can delete either of these files (or rather rename it to XF86Config.old, etc.). Then edit the other file and change "fglrx" to "nvidia".