Q I am having difficulties installing the latest Nvidia driver for Mandriva One. I have installed it on my main system, multi-booting with two XP Pro installations on a spare partition. My difficulty is in installing Nvidia-Linux-x86-177.80.pkg1.run. I have been able to execute the installer from outside X as suggested, but encounter only an error at the installer after unpacking. The error reports missing commands and with my fairly limited knowledge of the command line I can go no further! I am not presently connected online so I cannot use the package manager.
A It really helps if you can quote any error messages you see, as we're now left to guess at which commands are missing. However, I suspect that you don't have a compiler installed. The Nvidia driver package contains pre-built modules for various kernels, but if there isn't an exact match for your system it has to compile one. This is nothing to worry about, as the installer takes care of the whole process, but it does mean that you need to have a full compiler toolchain installed. It also requires the source code for the kernel you're using in order to build a matching module. At the very least you need to install GCC 4.2 and Automake, which should pull in all the other requirements as dependencies. This is not possible with the Mandriva One CD, as these packages are only included with the full Mandriva DVD.
Some package managers, like Synaptic used on Debian-based systems, have an option to generate a download script based on the packages you select. You can copy this script to a USB stick and use it to download the files you need on another, internet-connected, computer. Then you put the stick back in the offline computer and it will install all the packages you downloaded. However, Mandriva's package management system has no such option, making it a less useful option for an offline computer. Unless you can connect it to the internet for long enough to install the software you need, I would suggest either using Mandriva 2009, which is available as a full DVD, or a different distribution, like Debian or one of the Ubuntu variants.