This was, to put it bluntly, a royal pain in the ass. As mentioned before, I have an older nVidia GeForceFX 5900 GPU. For some reason this card has never worked well with the open-source nVidia drivers. So, even though I know it's shameful, I opt for the proprietary drivers. While when I was running Archlinux on this machine I was never able to get the nouveau drivers to work at all, at least in CentOS, their vesa driver worked for a single monitor. The problem is that I have an S-video out on my card that I like to use to make an old 27" in. CRT-TV a second monitor, so I can watch Netflix. Well, the only driver that ever works with the S-video has been still been the nVidia.
Now, there are a couple different extra repos out there that carry nVidia packages. I tried the one from rpmforge and it didn't work. After much frustration, finally getting the nvidia-settings to at least open, but still not getting X to load the nvidia module, I gave up. I decided that I would forgo the distro-taylored rpm and try installing the driver straight from the nVidia.com download page.
After some research I found out that this was fairly simple, all you have to do is run [CODE] # sh NVIDIA...{the rest of the install pkg name}[/CODE] as root and follow the prompts. That's it. However, there's a catch. You need to have the make, gcc, and kernel-devel packages also installed. So, I installed them, ran the install again. Now it's telling me that my kernel-devel stuff doesn't match my kernel... wtf? I promptly run a [CODE] # uname -r [/CODE] and find out that I'm using a "xen" kernel. Whatever that is. So I do some searching, find that there is in fact a kernel-xen-devel package, and install it. Alright, let's go again. This time the nVidia installation kindly informs me that it does not support the xen kernel. Son-of-bitch. I do some more research, install this "plain" kernel, edit my /etc/sysconfig/kernel file, change my DEFAULTKERNEL=kernel (rather than kernel-xen), edit my grub.conf to default to kernel 0 ("plain"), reboot, run the install script again, and OMFG it worked! Ran the nvidia-xconfig script, started up the nvidia-settings program (have to start it from a shell as root), configured my nvidia stuff, rebooted, and YES! YES! IT... W.O.R.K.E.D! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT WORKED!
After hours of toiling, I've finally gotten the graphics driver working. This has always proved to be the most difficult part of an installation and now that I've figured it out, I'm ecstatic. Time to celebrate and come back tomorrow for some VMware fun.
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