Lethe's Ccielogs

Hello all, I've been asked this specific topic a few times and I've seen it has been matter of discussion on a few forums I usually visit and I've struggled with this myself so I thought to post a mini guide on how to install Nvidia driver on your Fedora 12 so that you can enjoy Gnome-Shell or Compiz.

In Fedora 12 it is included a native Open Source driver named Nouveau which is still in heavy development and as a matter of fact does not support advanced features or full 3d acceleration, if you install the Nvidia driver without first disabling this particular feature you'll face problems as the two drivers don't play well together so first of all we need edit our grub.conf configuration file appending following string to the Kernel directive :

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nouveau.modeset=0 vga=792

In this case 792 is a resolution of 1024×768 with a 24-bit color depth, for your convenience and for a full list of codes and modes supported I've attached a txt file to the post so that you'll have a full reference, the final grub.conf file should look similar to the following taken from my machine :

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kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.x86_64 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_lethe-lv_root
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=it rhgb quiet
nouveau.modeset=0 vga=795

Once you've done this you're ready to start the installation of the required packages (I assume you've already installed rpm-fusion repositories on your machine) with the following command from the shell :

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yum install kmod-nvidia.$(uname -m) xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64

Once you've done this just reboot your machine and you'll be able to use full 3d acceleration and Compiz/Gnome shell according to your preferences, before you proceed with the installation, though, you should check that your graphic card is between the supported models on Nvidia website as this worked like a charm on my desktop machine but it refuses to work on my laptop even if the card is the same (an Nvidia GT8600 on the desktop and the 8600M GT model on the laptop).

Enjoy, Lethe.

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Daniele Catanesi, aka Lethe, is the mind behing Lethe's Ccielogs. He is a veteran of the IT industry with more than ten years of experience in the various fields. Daniele has been mainly working as IT Architect and Trainer for a lot of Enteprise customers implementing cutting edge technologies and complex solutions. Daniele currently holds various certification among which MCITP, CCNP, LPI, Citrix and working tirelessly to his RHCE and RHCA. When he is not busy working or studying for the next exam he writes on the blog trying to give administrators and students around the world tips and suggestion to help them succeed in their career and job.