Configuring a NVIDIA graphics chip for Fedora 12

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

This guide will help you configure the proprietary nvidia driver under Fedora 12. We will not be covering the open source nv module included with Xorg because its configuration is normally handled automatically by most Linux distributions.

NVIDIA provide their own license for their driver. You will need to read and accept this license before proceeding. You can read this license here.

You should run a full update for your installation of Fedora to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

The nvidia driver is not included with Fedora 12 so we will need to use a 3rd party repository. Here we will be using the RPM Fusion repository.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.

2. Switch to the root user by entering the command “su -” (without the quotes) and typing in your root password when asked.

3. Now we will enable the RPM Fusion repository, to do so just type the following (long) command:

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

You may be asked to importing a GPG key during this step, select yes to this.

4. Now execute the following command:

yum -y install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

5. Reboot your system and you will be using the nvidia driver.

Normally after installing the nvidia driver with the steps above your xorg.conf file should have automatically been updates to use the newer driver. If this did not happen or for some reason it has reverted then, as root, enter the following command:

nvidia-xconfig

This will switch you back to the nvidia driver.