Keith G. Robertson-Turner wrote:
Various parts of the upstream release are binary only and proprietary,
therefore a binary "repackaging" of the NVidia self-extracting archive is
a bit ethically "questionable", putting it mildly. Not that I'm judging
other efforts (Axel), just stating that personally I wouldn't do it. In a
perfect world, NVidia would officially release the full driver/glx SDK as
GPL'd OSS, but I think we all know that's never going to happen.
The Livna source RPM contains the original upstream release intact, and
the "rebuild" extracts the contents to create an RPM locally (4 in fact,
the driver module, the glx component, the glx devel package and a debug
package), in addition to various %pre and &post scripts to set everything
up properly and clean up.
Rebuilding only takes a few seconds, but if you really want a binary only
solution then stick with Axel Thimm's binaries at:
http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de/fedora/1/en/i386/RPMS.at-testing/
(also in "at-bleeding")
Bear in mind, that if you do choose an "RPM binary-only solution", then
every time you do a kernel update (and they're coming thick and fast
recently) you will have to wait for Axel to release a new NVidia package,
which won't be instantaneous. Also, if you run a custom kernel (maybe you
need to recompile for certain driver support for a new piece of hardware)
then you'll have no option but to rebuild using either the upstream
release or a source RPM.
Thanks for the great explanation. This has all been a great learning
experience for me!
--
HD
Tipping my hat to Fedora.
