Friday, March 11, 2011

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 display problem with nVidia Graphics

We had installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Client Edition for testing and found out that display wouldn't come sometimes. The system had a nVidia Graphics Chipset (GeForce 6150). We found that there was some problem with the nouveau driver in the kernel. After many trial and error, we solved the problem in following steps :-

Step 1 :- Edit the file /etc/grub.conf

Step 2 :- To disable the nouveau driver in the kernel, add with a space rdblacklist=nouveau at last to the line beginning with the word kernel.

Step 3 :- Download the latest driver for your chipset from nvidia.com. We got ours at http://www.nvidia.co.in/object/linux-display-ia32-260.19.44-driver-in.html You can check first from Supported products tab of the link whether your product is supported by the driver we used for our desktop.

Step 4 :- After you have downloaded the file NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.44.run, change to the directory containing the downloaded file, and as the root user run the executable:
# cd yourdirectory
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.44.run
 
Step 5 :- After the installation, reboot the machine and hopefully the display will start functioning normally.