FAQ: Nvidia & Blank X startup screen

[feenixx]

Nvidia's uninstaller doesn't seem to do too teriffic job when
it comes to remove existing (nvidia) drivers.

if your drivers seem to build fine without errors, but all you get is blank
X screen, try this :

drop to runlevel 3 and run Nvidia's installer with parameters '-a --uninstall'.
check out nvidia-installer.log that was created during uninstall and remove
'checksum mismatch' files it shows manually. most of these files have
driver version in their name (xxx.5536.so.1). if you find redundant files
left by earlier nvidia driver installs, remove those too.

don't remove files that .log reports as 'symlink failed, already exists..'

[garbage]

Originally Posted by feenixx

Nvidia's uninstaller doesn't seem to do too teriffic job when
it comes to remove existing (nvidia) drivers.

if your drivers seem to build fine without errors, but all you get is blank
X screen, try this :

drop to runlevel 3 and run Nvidia's installer with parameters '-a --uninstall'.
check out nvidia-installer.log that was created during uninstall and remove
'checksum mismatch' files it shows manually. most of these files have
driver version in their name (xxx.5536.so.1). if you find redundant files
left by earlier nvidia driver installs, remove those too.

don't remove files that .log reports as 'symlink failed, already exists..'

Interesting.
I use the nvidia kernel rpms from Livna.org without problem.
In fact I pull all the 'missing' functionality from there also.
They work closely with Fedora so their rpms are usually the most reliable.

Being an ex Mac user I find it much easier than all that archaic command line stuff.

[feenixx]

yeah, I guess people at Livna are doing good .SPEC files for RPM packages that
don't leave garbage lying around
I mean 'rpm -e' does better job than nvidia's own uninstall method.