Setting run levels and cd'ing into a specific directory

[Charles]

How to I set to default to run levet 3, and how to I make it cd'ing into the directory containing the downloaded file so I can run it? Instructios are down below for NVIdia Driver installation.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN DRIVER INSTALLATION

Before beginning the driver installation, you should exit the X server.
In addition you should set your default run level so you will boot to a
vga console and not boot directly into X (please consult the documentation
that came with your Linux distribution if you are unsure how to do this;
this is normally done by modifying your /etc/inittab file). This will
make it easier to recover if there is a problem during the installation.
After installing the driver you must edit your X config file before
the newly installed driver will be used. See the section below entitled
EDITING YOUR X CONFIG FILE.


INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW NVIDIA DRIVER INSTALLER

After you have downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629-pkg1.run,
begin installation by exiting X, cd'ing into the directory containing
the downloaded file, and run:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6629-pkg1.run

[kilgoretrout]

Please post the distro that your running. The nvidia driver is a kernel module that must be compiled. The file that your run in text mode does all this automatically but you must have your kernel source installed for the nvidia module to compile. For most distros, the kernel source is not installed by default. You will also need to edit your X config file, usually /etc/X11/XF86Config or xorg.conf, in text mode which means you will have to learn how to use a command line text editor like "vi".
None of this stuff is all that hard but there are a lot of steps involved which can vary depending on the distro you use.

[Charles]

Red Hat 9.0 Shriek.

[MichaelS]

Have a look to see if there's anything in /usr/src/ you should see a symbolic link called linux that points to your current kernel source directory. If it doesn't exist, run uname -a and check your kernel version, see if you can find it in /usr/src (this is assuming you haven't compiled a custom kernel).

If the above is all good, then you need to make sure your not running in a GUI (XWindows) temporarily. Switch to single user mode (runlevel 1 on almost all distros) by using init 1 then run the NVIDIA installer with the command shown in the install file (as you quoted in the last line in your post). Once the installer is done (hopefully with no errors), you need to edit your XWindows configuration as kilgoretrout suggested.

If i'm not mistaken, RedHat 9 uses the old naming convention for the config file for XWindows (/etc/X11/XF86Config). As always, create a backup of the old config file, cp /etc/X11/XF86Config /etc/X11/XF86Config.BACKUP Now comes the editing (i'll separate it for cleanliness)

Editing /etc/X11/XF86Config with vi
---
1) Run vi /etc/X11/XF86Config
2) Type this in (without the full colon): /Section "Device" <enter key>
3) Move down to Driver, then move to the letter v in vesa so that the cursor/block is on the v
4) Use the x key to delete all the characters in the word vesa, if you make a mistake press (with the full colon) :u and press enter to undo the last change
5) use the i key once to activate insert mode, and type in nvidia so that the word nvidia is between the quotation marks
6) hit the ESC key
7) type (with the full colon) :wq
8) run the sync command at the shell prompt to make sure that the changes will be written to disk
---

Now to try it out, use su - username where username is your regular user (hopefully your not using XWindows as root) then run: startx Hopefully the system will load the nvidia kernel module for you and the NVIDIA logo will appear for a few seconds, then XWindows will load with the new drivers.

If it doesn't work out, note the any error messages you get, then use exit to leave your user-shell to go back to root, then revert your XWindows config file back to the way it was by running: cat /etc/X11/XF86Config.BACKUP > /etc/X11/XF86Config then run sync

Let us know how it goes... If it doesn't work out, we'll need to edit the /etc/inittab file so that XWindows doesn't start on bootup, and run a few other commands to refresh the kernel module list, and try to manually load the driver, but hopefully we wont need to get into all that.

Good Luck,

Michael