Before you begin the installation, exit the X server and terminate all OpenGL applications (note that it is possible that some OpenGL applications persist even after the X server has stopped). You should also set the default run level on your system such that it will boot to a VGA console, and not directly to X. Doing so will make it easier to recover if there is a problem during the installation process. See Appendix I, Tips for New Linux Users for details.

After you have downloaded the file NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-195.36.15-pkg#.run, change to the directory containing the downloaded file, and as the root user run the executable:

    # cd yourdirectory
    # sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-195.36.15-pkg#.run

The .run file is a self-extracting archive. When executed, it extracts the contents of the archive and runs the contained nvidia-installer utility, which provides an interactive interface to walk you through the installation.

nvidia-installer will also install itself to /usr/bin/nvidia-installer, which may be used at some later time to uninstall drivers, auto-download updated drivers, etc. The use of this utility is detailed later in this chapter.

You may also supply command line options to the .run file. Some of the more common options are listed below.

The NVIDIA kernel module has a kernel interface layer that must be compiled specifically for each kernel. NVIDIA distributes the source code to this kernel interface layer, as well as precompiled versions for many of the kernels provided by popular Linux distributions.

When the installer is run, it will determine if it has a precompiled kernel interface for the kernel you are running. If it does not have one, the installer will check your system for the required kernel sources and compile the interface for you. You must have the source code for your kernel installed for compilation to work. On most systems, this means that you will need to locate and install the correct kernel-source, kernel-headers, or kernel-devel package; on some distributions, no additional packages are required (e.g. Fedora Core 3, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4).

After the correct kernel interface has been identified (either included in the .run file or compiled from source code), the kernel interface will be linked with the closed-source portion of the NVIDIA kernel module. This requires that you have a linker installed on your system. The linker, usually /usr/bin/ld, is part of the binutils package. You must have a linker installed prior to installing the NVIDIA driver.

Without options, the .run file executes the installer after unpacking it. The installer can be run as a separate step in the process, or can be run at a later time to get updates, etc. Some of the more important commandline options of nvidia-installer are: