Pascal Bleser wrote:
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Stefan Dirsch wrote:
On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 01:01:37PM +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
No real explanation given. [...] WONTFIX, build it in the BS. WTF! That's a perfectly valid reason. You can build it in the build service or wait for others to do it. BTW, see
project: home:sndirsch package: tiny-nvidia-installer
Better copy it immediately. I plan to remove it again pretty soon.
SUSE has no obligation to fulfill your wishes unless you have a very convincing reason (and no, it's not you who needs to be convinced).
Carl-Daniel.. geez... wth are you talking about. Of course they have no obligations, except that if Novell really wants "openSUSE" and a community, then they do in order to make it work.
John (the OP), Benjamin and I are amongst those who are on the "front" on IRC with new SUSE users and less experienced ones, who are asking for help.
If such tools (like y2pmsh or tiny-nvidia-installer) *are* helpful from our experience, then I *do* think it's a valid point.
Wrt the "openSUSE" community, we're doing a big job there and believe it or not, #suse is one of the most qualified and helpful linux support rooms on IRC.
I gave him a bunch of reasons.
Yes, after he reopened the bug ;)
1) It's an undocumented way to install the NVIDIA driver. The driver update process should be used instead - if possible. Otherwise use the official installer. See http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html for details. 2) There's no official download location for up-to-date sources for it, so sooner or later it gets broken anyway and I won't notice, because I no longer use it. 3) IMHO using tiny-nvidia-installer is completely useless. Using it looks easy in the first place - given that you have gcc and kernel-source installed, but you'll wake up after the first kernel update (Xserver is no longer starting!), because you need to recompile the kernel module after each update. Since this is a manual step anyway, IMHO it's better to know what you're doing and having the complete installer already on your harddisk. At least then you don't need to download the complete driver again and again. IMHO this is well documented in my HOWTO.
http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html
Probably he cannot be convinced, because he is used to this tool, relies on it and it somewhat works for him (good enough).
Stefan, I'm sure that in your focus or your coworkers at SUSE, indeed, it's a useless tool, it's as easy to grab the NVIDIA-*.run from their site. So it is to me, to the OP, or probably almost everyone on this list.
The point is, spend some more time on #suse and you'll see the kind of issues we're trying to help people with.
IMO the most annoying things are, in no particular order: (1) no command-line (or trivial) way to add repositories (aka "installation sources") (2) adding repositories like Packman and mine to get a full-featured amarok, mplayer, etc... (3) installing the proprietary nvidia and ati drivers
While improvement is underway with (1)(rug doesn't do the trick, need something without zmd) and we probably can't do anything about (2) for the reasons we all know, tiny-nvidia-installer *is* helpful for (3).
Obviously, as Benjamin wrote in a previous mail of this thread, having KMPs is even better (if they are kept up-to-date with nvidia drivers, at least somewhat, and especially with kernel package releases from the online updates), no question.
But if the KMPs are not present or cannot be used, believe me, it's yet another problem to tell beginners where and how to get the .run file from nvidia, and tiny-nvidia-installer actually is pretty helpful wrt that.
The most annoying thing with the installation of nvidia's driver is having to switch to runlevel 3 though, by a large margin. Sounds easy ? Sure. But when people are on IRC with xchat, konversation, kopete or chatzilla and you're telling them what to do to install it, they have to quit their IRC client. So, what happens if anything goes wrong ? You can't guide them step-by-step anymore either. (maybe a simple command as a shell script that gets you to #suse on freenode with irssi would help ;))
Up to SUSE 9.3, the script used by the online update patch used some trickery to fool the nvidia driver installer - maybe that's still a good enough approach to make it easier.
I've started a shell script that checks prerequisites, warns/stops if X is running, pulls the latest nvidia driver from their website (works for 32bit and 64bit) and then runs the installer, but it sure needs more testing. Maybe it's even a good idea to make an RPM out of it, with Requires: make gcc glibc-devel kernel-source in it. http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/files/nvidia-installer.sh
Anyhow, John (the OP)'s point is that it is a real benefit of having it in the default selection, because it removes yet another (difficult) step for beginners.
But then again, maybe installing packages and adding repositories is still to complex in the first place. If that was trivial to do, even for beginners, it would make a lot of things easier.
cheers - --
Perhaps someone who cares and is capable can take this on if SuSE cannot, after all openSUSE is what it says. I don't know how useful this tool is, never heard of it until now and have never found a necessity to use anything from SuSE to install ATI or NVidia drivers. ATI script does something distro specific, but often doesn't work - I have had a kernel related problem that I reported to them 2 releases previous and it's still there. NVidia's stuff always works with their instructions and when you hit problems with kernel changes, patches are relatively swift arriving - running kernel 2.6.19-rc4 on x86 (10.2Beta1) and x86_64 (10.1) with NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9626-pkg1.run (Beta)+ patches. IMHO as NVidia does such a good job, there are far more pressing issues to be tackled by the openSUSE team. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org