Bug 128630

Summary:	Uninstalling nVidia binary driver
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Michael Stather <kontakt>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Marcus Schaefer <ms>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	jsrain
Version:	Alpha 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Michael Stather 2005-10-16 23:18:15 UTC

I´ve installed the nVidia binary driver through YaST. Then I switched to an ATI
graphics card. In order to uninstall the nVidia driver (the Ati ones don´t work
if bot drivers are present on a system) I´ve to download the driver from their
website and then run it with "--uninstall".
To make it easier to switch graphics cards (especially for new users) I suggest
chaning the nvidia driver to a "fake" package which will install it if you
install the package and uninstall it you remove it. Updating could also be
handled by YOU, if there´s a new version of the package and you update the
driver would be updated.

Comment 1 Michael Gross 2005-10-17 06:45:12 UTC

If this would be implemented, sax as well as the packager would be involved. Marcus and Jiri: Please decide what should be done.

Comment 2 Marcus Schaefer 2005-10-17 08:06:05 UTC

I think it is not a good idea to allow sax to uninstall the driver
it didn't install. So I see no reason why to have the responsibility
for uninstalling an unknown environment.

- You told us that it is not possible to have both driver installed
  nvidia and radeon. I think this is wrong because I tested radeon and
  nvidia cards in multihead environments in the past and that worked as
  it should. I really assume you didn't call sax2 with the option -r
  to reprobe for new hardware, did you ? In that case sax2 is working
  on the old "nvidia" cache. To create a new suggestion based on your
  ATI card simply call

     sax2 -r

- You told us that you need to download the nvidia installer do uninstall
  the driver. Well this is not true because you only have to call

     /usr/bin/tiny-nvidia-installer --uninstall

  This has been mentioned in the manual to SuSE Linux

Comment 3 Michael Stather 2005-10-17 21:26:31 UTC

OK I was wrong about the uninstaller.
But I didn´t use SAX2 when I changed back to ATI because unfortunately it can´t create a working configuration for the ATI binary driver (which was another suggestion, IMHO new users don´t know how to edit xorg.conf and they don´t care about "the license of the ATO driver being compatible with SuSE"). I just used all thesections expect the "device" one which I copied from the config file created by "fglrxconfig". So this should be working for the card. But on starting X I got several messages about "nvidia X driver not installed" and unresolved symbols in "libdri.a". I uninstalled the nvidia driver and everything worked fine. I used the newest ATI driver and a nvidia driver form march (the last one which supported my TNT2 card).