Bugzilla – Bug 128630
Uninstalling nVidia binary driver
Last modified: 2005-10-17 21:26:31 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.
If this would be implemented, sax as well as the packager would be involved. Marcus and Jiri: Please decide what should be done.
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
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).