Q I work for a web design company specialising in websites for graphic design companies. We have programs that manipulate large multimedia files, and use the graphics processor unit functions on an NVIDIA card, but find ourselves the graphics card. We currently use having to compile the drivers every time we recompile the kernel - which we do quite often. Then the old drivers for the old kernel stop working if we roll back to the old one, then we have to install again. Can you help?
A The NVIDIA drivers are frequently updated (this is a good thing), but your problem is really related to the split nature of the code - there's a software driver and a kernel module. Fortunately, you can add one without the other. Installing just the kernel module should mean that you can keep the old, compatible software driver and have it work from whatever kernel you are running. Download the appropriate driver packages from the NVIDIA site and try the following:
/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7667-pkg1.run -A -K
This should install the module, but leave the driver code the same.