Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Installing Proprietary Video Drivers

Installing Proprietary Video Drivers

Fedora does not provide the official NVIDIA or ATI display drivers because they are closed source and Fedora is committed to delivering a totally free (as in speech) distribution. You can download the latest official drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html or from http://www.ati.com/. If you encounter problems with the NVIDIA drivers in particular, check out http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=14 for more help. The NVIDIA staff do contribute to that forum, so you should be able to find expert help when you need it.

Bear in mind that if you go down the "official" route, you will have to take certain steps. It would be great to be able to access the drivers through yum, so much so that the Livna repository now has prepackaged the drivers into an RPM that is easily downloaded as long as you have the Livna repository enabled for yum.

To get the NVIDIA driver using yum, you need to have enabled the Livna repository (see Chapter 34, "Advanced Software Management," for more information on setting up repositories). At the command line, type

#yum install kmod-nvidia

and press Enter. After a few seconds, yum retrieves and downloads the latest NVIDIA driver that is appropriate for your current kernel version. After it finishes installing the packages, you have to restart your machine to take advantage of the improvements.

Installing the ATI driver is much the same because Livna.org also has a set of drivers available for ATI hardware. As with the NVIDIA driver, you need to be a super user and enter the following command:

#yum install kmod-fglrx

A restart of the system is necessary before you can make full use of the 3D capabilities of your card.

Оглавление книги