[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Perhaps this should be split into two different pages, one for amd, one for nvidia. The current structure is too book-like. - — Tony Senerchia 2012/08/22 08:52


I've added another way to shut down X. — Brian Lawrence 2012/08/22 11:57

Brian, I originally had included that (telinit 3) in the description of ways to shut down X (along with init 3, which I seem to remember working on some distro at some point), but removed it after issuing the command on my system and seeing no results. I do already have the nvidia driver installed, but I don't know why that would make a big difference. So I removed those commands. Can anyone confirm either way? Thanks! — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/02 11:58
It's always worked for me, including updating already installed drivers. — Brian Lawrence 2012/09/03 06:18
Has to do with my crude, unsecure, not-very-good way of getting into X. If /etc/inittab is edited correctly and system boots into runlevel 4, then it works. Otherwise, it does nothing. I may want to add a part on good practices for starting X, since there's more than one way to do it and some - like what I was doing - probably are ill-advised. — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/05 10:52

The use of NVIDIA-Linux-x86specificrevision.run may not be clear for unexperienced users. Is there a more elegant way of writing this, or should an example be given? — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/02 13:34

Maybe “version-number”? — Brian Lawrence 2012/09/03 06:18
Ooops! Changes for the better already made by alienbob. — Brian Lawrence 2012/09/03 06:28
Yes! It looks good, and addressed some of the messiness I was running into with the whole shutting the x server down section. I'll try to re-write it to put the graceful way first, relegating the crude way to a note. Or should I do away with it entirely? — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/04 10:27

In “Installation via nVIDIA Binary” section, in the first Tip, super-user and root are both used. Should these be used interchangeably, or should I opt for just one? In that case, which one? — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/04 10:27

Use root. Seems to be the most commonly used option in documentation. — Brian Lawrence 2012/09/05 04:17
Done — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/05 10:52

The question arises here whether one should strive to be exhaustive. IMHO Slackware offers one quite simple and elegant way to install proprietary NVidia drivers, that's with the SlackBuilds from SlackBuilds.org. Even more simple when using sbopkg. Plus, the integrated nvidia-switch commandline utility makes installation/uninstallation of these drivers very easy. Of course, YMMV, but as far as I'm concerned, I would explain the easiest way, and that's it. Different ways may lead to Rome, but sure as hell are apt to confuse less experimented users. — Niki Kovacs Tue Sep 4 20:50:12 CEST 2012

While I agree that we should do our best to avoid confusion and that the article can be edited a bit further, I think it is unwise to simply say “There's sbopkg for that.” In that case, learning via Slackware is minimal; why not just use Ubuntu? I thought “If you learn Slackware, you learn Linux,” right? Personally - and I am not alone - I won't use sbopkg. I tried it out, found it more confusing than the old way - except that it downloads everything you need - and I often ran into issues. sbopkg aside, I don't even understand the advantages of the nvidia SlackBuild. It seems to make the process even more complicated, especially since it requires 3 packages and multiple commands to do what the binary installer does already. Is it just that it's in pkgtool for uninstalls? Anyway, my point is that while one way seems better to you, it seems convoluted to me. It's true the article is long and still needs work, but I've tried to suggest all other ways before the long way. And what's wrong with being exhaustive? No one needs a wiki that only says “Use sbopkg to install nvidia drivers.” — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/04 13:27
OK that sounds quite convincing to me. — Niki Kovacs Wed Sep 5 10:08:50 CEST 2012

Should this page have a needs_attention tag because it lacks the ATI/AMD information? — Tony Senerchia 2012/09/05 11:56


 talk:slackware:amd_nvidia ()