Accelerated nVidia drivers with gcc3

Some recent accelerated nVidia graphics drivers may compile with inconsistent results. At least version 1.0-4349 is known to have problems and should be avoided. At the time of writing, version 1.0-4363 is the newest and works well with gcc 3.2.2. If a personally compiled driver does not run as expected, possible workarounds include:

• Use a precompiled version of the driver. If you install without the "-n" option i.e. sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run, then the installation program will attempt to download and install a precompiled driver from the nVidia download site.

• Use an earlier version of gcc (one of the 2.x series). This will require installation of the older version of gcc.

• Use an earlier version of the nVidia driver. A previous release of nVidia's accelerated driver is 1.0-4149 which appears to compile correctly with version 3 releases of gcc (version 2 releases too).

  The nVidia drivers up to and including 1.0-4149 use a different installation method when compiling from source code. Two gzipped tar files, NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4149.tar.gz and NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4149.tar.gz should be downloaded and unpacked somewhere convenient e.g. /tmp. Change to console mode (telinit 3) and, as root, cd into the NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4149 directory and run the command make install. Now cd into the NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4149 directory and run the command make install.

• Use a driver version known to compile with gcc 3 and which works correctly. Driver version 1.0-4363 works correctlt when compiled with gcc 3.2.2.

• Use a non-accelerated driver. In this case no special compilation is necessary because the driver supplied with XFree86 is used. Of course the accelerated OpenGL performance is not then available.

Note that any of these options only install the accelerated drivers. It is still necessary to configure XFree86 itself.