Install NVIDIA on Mandriva 2007

I have installed the display card driver on Mandriva 2007 successfully. Cheers!! There was a long story in order to get the work done and due to the lack of knowledge in Linux, I have been hitting the wall for so many times. You know what; I have spent up to three days to install this driver. This is so ridiculous.

First day:

I get the driver from NVIDIA website. There was a file with RUN extension. I think this must be EXE file for the setup. Unfortunately I am not able to execute this file under my user account. Why? In order to execute this file I must have the administrator privilege.

How can I gain the administrator privilege? I think that must be the root user. But how can I switch to root user?

I spent a few hours to search in my Linux book. Frankly, I have learned this shell command during my school time. I have totally forgotten my learning due to the reason of I never use Linux in my daily work as it can not play my favorite games. I just learn for fun. By the way the driver is quite hard to find too.

Second day:

I continue my searching. Finally I found it. It is su command. But I get this from Internet, not from the book.

Although I have successfully switch to root user but I am still not able to execute the program. This is because it require me to log out from X window then only I can continue the installation.

Well. This seems a bit tricky for me as the distribution which install on my machine is automatically start X window after boot up. I have no clue on how to exit the X window. As I mention earlier I have totally forgotten what I have learn.

I did a search on the help to look up how can I logout to the console mode. Frankly I had never trying to logout to Linux console on this distribution since the installation. I have spent few hours on this issue. Fortunately I have find out how to do that.

Now what? This is the real time for me to install the driver at the initial though. It failed again during the installation process; an error showing that the driver is not able to find the source tree.

What the source tree exactly is? I spent some time on Internet to dig out this.

Luckily this is not a big issue. It is actually referring to the kernel source tree. Wow, this really a bit surprise for me. This is my first installation experience that requires the source tree to compile the driver. I had never done it on Windows. This is so interesting...

Third day:

The source tree needs to be installed manually in my machine. It is not in the default list of the installation. This can be done under the control center.

Well. Everything is ready. Guess what? After the installation, first thing I am going to do is to turn on the 3D mode. But I don’t see any 3D after the configuration. I do log out and back again in order for the new setting to take effect. Does the installation completely done? Do I need to make some configuration to the X config file? One thing for sure is the desktop alignment was correct (before this the desktop alignment is shift at the right side) and during the boot up process I can see the NVIDIA logo shown up.

Does this means that I have successfully install the driver?