Monday, June 22, 2009

Fixing X11 on Red Hat

Every time I upgrade the kernel on my Red Hat machine and reboot, startx errors out. The xorg.0.log says, "(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!"

NVidia has tips here, but they are predicated on running modprobe nvidia. When I did that, modprobe and rmmod reported that the nvidia driver was not present in /proc/modules.

The fix for my machine:
  1. Run nvidia-installer --update
    • OR, Run nvidia-installer-latest to get the FTP URL for the latest nvidia driver.
    • Download same using wget. (Cut & paste may work.)