Web Dev Tutorials + College Humour Technical tutorials for Web developers with a dash of crude humour

How to install 9800 Nvidia Drivers on OpenSuse 11.1

I recently had a hell of a time getting my GeForce 9800 NVidia card integrated into my OpenSuse installation. I looked around and everthing in the search results that I tried didn’t seem to work, so maybe this will help some people.

1. From a clean installation, go to http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA and select the one-click install that corresponds to your model of video card.
2. Your browser should ask you if you want to save or open the .ymp file, just click ‘open’.
3. You should then be taken through an installer that will download and install your drivers. After this, you’ll be prompted to reboot. I guess for most people, this is all you’d have to do and you’d be running your NVidia card without problems. If you’re an unfortunate bastard like I was (which you probably are because you’re reading this), then you’ll need to follow the rest of these instructions.
4. Go superuser (su).
5. Type ’sax2 -r’. This should make your computer do some type of crazy shit that you don’t really need to be concerned about. All you and I need to know is that it’s probably going to result in your X server starting successfully.
6. You should be brought back to the shell. Type ’startx’ to load your X environment.
7. Once it loads, type ‘nvidia-settings’ and do any additional configuration you need to do for your video card (i.e. setting up multiple monitors)
8. Restart the machine through your X server’s restart function. Sometimes, the first time you restart, your settings will be a little screwy. I don’t know why, but restarting a second time usually works.

Good luck!