Unfortunately you did less to find out the cause of the problem. It is no effort to blame you! Seeing the situation you describe you will have to ask yourself: what might be the reason that directly after the driver compilation it is loaded running kernel .2179 while after a reboot the system does not find the nvidia.o module. That is the point and not whether rebooting to runlevel 3 or 5.
So lets gather some data. I suggest you do the following tasks to discover what's going wrong.
1) Compile the NVidia driver. It will be loaded then. Find out where it is by running "find /lib/modules -name nvidia.o". It should be "/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2179.nptl/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o". If the module is not in the kernel module's directory you see already the reason for the failure. Then check all nvidia.o modules the find run printed out for their dates. One of them must have the current date. Will it be compiled for the old .2174 kernel? Then follow the advise to uninstall the old kernel source. Check also that /etc/modules.conf contains a line "alias char-major-195 nvidia".
and
- nvidia driver and module work fine when booting into 2174.
Clint
Alexander
Success!
When I ran "find /lib/modules -name nvidia.o" I noted these pieces of relevant info:
/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2179.nptl/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o /lib/modules/2.4.18-18.8.0/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o /lib/modules/2.4.18-19.8.0/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o /lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2174.nptl/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia/nvidia.o
Since I knew things were working in .2174, I figured it was worth a shot to simply copy the .2179 module to a similarly named directory for .2179. So I went to
/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2179.nptl/kernel/drivers/video/
and ran "mkdir nvidia", "cd ./nvidia", followed by "cp nvidia.o ./nvidia"
and rebooted. It works! The message indicates "OK" when the nvidia module is loaded, and the nvidia splash screen comes right up before getting the login screen. glxgears, tux racer, and all the other GL goodies are working well.
Before I celebrate too much, I must ask: Is there anything I've overlooked? Any further considerations before getting back to work? Will this workaround cause any problems?
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the people who generously offered their time both on the list and off-list! I sincerely appreciate your willingness to help this new guy. I owe you each a "refreshing beverage"!
Clint -- Clint Harshaw <clint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
