nvidia driver with PAE kernel - no go

[jeepster]

A few years ago, I used the nvidia proprietary driver in Oracle Linux 5.8 (64-bit) with no problems.
I need the driver again for some software package that requires either RHEL4 or 5 with nvidia driver.
I tried to install in Centos 5.11 (32-bit) running PAE kernel. However it fails to start X.
Error message includes "FATAL Module nvidia not found"
So we must revert to old xorg.conf with nv driver.
I have another PC with 32-bit Centos 5.11 but with SMP kernel. I can install the nvidia driver on that okay.
Both have old graphics cards that are supported by the version of nvidia driver, which I downloaded from nvidia.

[aks]

"FATAL Module nvidia not found"

Probably means the module has not been loaded. Can you manually modprobe it?

[TrevorH]

I remember that nvida was unsupported on a PAE kernel back in 2009 when a colleague of mine tried it but that there were ways of making it work if you tried hard enough. However I'm not sure how successful that was.

[jeepster]

I remember that nvida was unsupported on a PAE kernel back in 2009 when a colleague of mine tried it but that there were ways of making it work if you tried hard enough. However I'm not sure how successful that was.

I found a kludge in Fedora forum. Procedure includes installing kernel-PAE-devel before nvidia driver and a warning steps must be done exactly as described.

[NedSlider]

Have you tried the nvidia drivers from elrepo?

There is a kmod-nvidia-PAE package for PAE kernels.

First you must uninstall any previous NVIDIA driver software installs, then:

yum install kmod-nvidia-PAE

and reboot.

Hope that helps.

[NedSlider]

Oh, and there are also older legacy PAE driver packages too:

kmod-nvidia-173xx-PAE
kmod-nvidia-304xx-PAE
kmod-nvidia-340xx-PAE

depending how old your device is.

nvidia-detect (also from elrepo) will identify the correct driver for your hardware.

Hope that helps