gento

Introduction

The latest "stable" nvidia drivers in portage is still 1.0-6629; this is pathetic. Not only do these old drivers lack support for newer cards, they also have known issues with udev & new (2.6.13+) kernels. This guide will show you how to get the latest "testing" (~keyword) drivers which fix both of these issues and more.

This is now out of date as the Nvidia Drivers packages have been combined into one ebuild which is now known as x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers and it is currently masked as testing but is the latest version in Portage Admiral Trigger Happy 02:45, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

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Unmasking

In addition to nvidia-kernel & nvidia-glx, we will also need to unmask eselect & eselect-opengl. eselect-opengl is the new replacement for the old opengl-update which is needed for newer nvidia-kernel versions. There are 2 easy ways to do this:

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By Hand

Old Versions: To unmask these packages, add these lines to /etc/portage/package.keywords with your favorite text editor:

media-video/nvidia-kernel media-video/nvidia-glx

New Version: Unmask my adding the following line to /etc/portage/package.keywords (Make sure to change ARCH to x86, or your relavant arch:

x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers ~ARCH

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With a One-liner Script

This simple script will add the 4 unmask lines just like the "By Hand" method above:

echo -e "media-video/nvidia-kernel\nmedia-video/nvidia-glx" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

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Emerging

Run emerge -av nvidia-glx and confirm that it is now going to install the latest version. If so, say yes! If not, you screwed up.

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Finishing up

If you are just upgrading from an old version and already had the old module loaded, you will need to unload & reload the kernel module before trying to startx:

rmmod nvidia && modprobe nvidia

And that should do it.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Unmask_Nvidia_Drivers#With_a_One-liner_Script