I found out that not a few people who use the nVidia (Linux) drivers from the manufacturer’s site encounter hangups after installing it to their system. I’ve had this problem for years, so I shied away from the commercial drivers and got myself contented with the non-accelerated open source drivers.
I recently found a post in a forum that finally gave a solution to the problem and it involves editing the X configuration files in /etc/X11. I modified the Device section to look lie this:
Section “Device”
#VideoRam 65536
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
Identifier “** NVIDIA (generic) [nv]”
Driver “nvidia”
Option “NvAGP” “0″
Option “RenderAccel” “Off”
Option “IgnoreDisplayDevices” “DFP,TV”
Option “NoRenderExtension” “Off”
Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “Off”
EndSection
Now I can watch the MTV of BEP’s “My Humps” without any hiccups — and the best part is, NO HANGUPS!
I’ve done upgrading the kernel to 2.6.14 last weekend and right now I’m a bit comfortable with it. I’m not worried anymore that I might have missed a module or two during the upgrade process.
What I did was a three-step process, actually. The first was to reinstall the entire system, but during the install process itself, I have booted the test26.s image (from the CD) to start things. After copying the necessary files, I selected the test26 kernel image as the one to be used in my new linux installation. After rebooting the system, I installed the other packages in the testing directory of the second install CD of Slackware 10.2 (the kernel modules and alsa drivers, specifically).
That’s all there is to it. I’ve tried the upgrade a few times before, but it was the first time that I got things to work without introducing new problems to the system.
Of course, things were a lot easier since I have a backup of all the utilities I’ve downloaded and all documents in my then current installation. So when trying a major upgrade like this, don’t forget to BACKUP!