the pc i run opensuse on is approx. 10 years old. i mostly use it as a file server and a few other functions. not so much as a desktop…but i decided to install nvidia drivers just to try out desktop effects. just because.

i installed nvidia drivers probably about 5 years ago and remember it as a painless process. at the time i think there was only one branch of linux drivers. now there are 4 driver branches. because of this pc’s age i need to use the oldest branch 71.86.xx for a geforce2 gts card. while looking into all this i found out that suse has nvidia repositories to make the installation foolproof. unfortunately, the repositories don’t have any packages for the driver branch i need. so that left the manual process of installing the nvidia driver. that process is fairly easy too. just let the nvidia package build the kernel module for you and reconfigure x.

i did all that, the module built successfully. starting x in a reconfigured state failed though. i did a limited amount of research on the problem and it seems that this particular driver currently doesn’t work with the recent x.org release. oh well. i don’t think i’ll spend any more time tinkering with it.