How to install ATI or nVidia Binary Drivers on Foresight 1.4

This guide is for installing binary drivers on Foresight 1.4 or older, and will not work on Foresight 2.0 or newer.  

Installing the non-free binary drivers for ATI or nVidia graphics chipsets is easy. Just update your group-dist with the appropriate flavor, as follows. This page is written for Foresight Linux 1.4.x and NOT for FL 2!

Note that thanks to flavor-affinity in Conary, once you've done this, you need not specify the flavor when updating group-dist in the future, i.e. sudo conary update group-dist will "just work".

All commands should be run as root unless otherwise noted. Commands can be run as root using sudo.

Installing the Drivers

ATI Users

Important note: If you want to enable Compiz, do not install the proprietary ATI drivers, ATI's binary drivers do not work with Compiz due to not supporting the texture_from_pixmap OpenGL extension.  Use the open source ATI driver, "radeon" to enable Compiz.

To install the drivers, update your group-dist with the ati, !nvidia flavor:

sudo conary update group-dist=['ati, !nvidia']

Once this is done, you will need to update xorg.conf. ATI provides aticonfig to do this. For single head users, this is as easy as running the following command:

sudo aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

For multiple monitor (dual head or more), see the documentation for aticonfig.

See also HOWTO install latest ATI drivers

nVidia Users

To install the drivers, update your group-dist with the !ati, nvidia flavor:

sudo conary update group-dist=['!ati, nvidia']

In Foresight Linux 2, you install the nVidia drivers like this:

sudo conary update nvidia nvidia-kernel

Now run nVidia's configuration tool:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

To enable 3D Desktop you should just be able to switch it on via panel. If this does not work (it should) you may have to edit the video card device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Videocard0"
 Driver      "nvidia"
 VendorName  "nvidia"
 BoardName   "nvidia"
 Option      "DigitalVibrance" "64"
 Option      "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
 Option      "XvmcUsesTextures" "true"
 Option      "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
 Option      "Coolbits" "1"
 Option      "RenderAccel" "true"
 Option      "NoLogo" "true"
 Option      "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Post-Installation

Once you have installed the drivers and configured them, you'll need to logout and restart gdm from the command line (or restart the computer) to see the changes. You can restart gdm by running sudo service xdm restart.

 What to do if the nVidia driver crashes because it cannot load the wfb module

If the nvidia driver crashes because it cannot load the wfb module, you are probably missing a symlink

cd /usr/lib/xorg/modules/
ls | grep libnvidia-wfb.so

Make sure that it returns exactly one result
Now you need to make the symlink:

sudo ln -s libnvidia-wfb.so.* libwfb.so

Now restart your xserver (making sure that the nvidia drivers are enabled first)

sudo nvidia-xconfig
sudo service xdm restart

If all went well, it should be operating correctly now.

What package contains the nvidia.ko module ?

nvidia-kernel

Re-creating your Xorg.conf file

If you need to re-create your xorg.conf file from scratch, from a console type

sudo mkxorgconfig

See also

How to install drivers for older nVidia cards
[foresight1:How to install nVidia drivers which are not in the repository through conary]