Help Me keep my system stable between driver upgrades

[brianvidia]

I was previously running NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629 and used it through several kernel upgrades.

I needed to upgrade my kernel from 2.6.11 to 2.6.11.5 because it solves a problem with Alsa that was bothering me something terrible.

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629 no longer worked, so I downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7167. I attempted to use:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7167 -K --kernel-name=2.6.11.5-`hostname`-`date +%F` but it warned me that I couldn't use the -K switch because it was a different driver version than the one currently installed.

I very reluctantly rebooted, Alt+Ctrl+F1 and ran the command again without the -K option. It removed the older driver, and installed the new one. I started the display manager and thankfully it came up fine.

How do I install the a certain version of the nvidia driver for only a specific kernel, leaving the old driver attached to an older kernel so that in the event the new one bombs I can bring my display manager back up?

[zander]

You can only have one NVIDIA driver version installed at any one time (unless you use a script to switch the X/OpenGL driver files at boot time); this is an architectural limitation and not specific to the NVIDIA driver). The -K switch is designed to add kernel modules for new kernels to existing driver installations of the same version, only.

[brianvidia]

Originally Posted by zander

You can only have one NVIDIA driver version installed at any one time (unless you use a script to switch the X/OpenGL driver files at boot time); this is an architectural limitation and not specific to the NVIDIA driver). The -K switch is designed to add kernel modules for new kernels to existing driver installations of the same version, only.

Thanks, zander. I guess it'll be easy enough to run the old version's installer if the new driver goes nuts. Thanks for giving us nice drivers.