I have a nvidia geforce 7600GS 256MB dual dvi vedio card. My operating system is redhat linux with current version: 2.6.9-55.0.2.ELsmp

My system will have some kernel update about every 2 months. Everytime after updating kernel and rebooting, it will load vesa vedio card driver and fail to use the installed nvidia driver. So right now, I have to reinstall nvidia driver everytime after updating kernel. I have done this at least 4 times within last 12 months! Does anyone have any better ideas? Any way to install nvidia driver permenately? Or I simply should not update kernel when the new one is available? In fact, this is also a problem for my sound card driver! I hate to update anything now

Thank you for any input in advance!

Well, that's pretty standard with most distros and it gets particularly annoying when they frequently switch to new kernels. All I can suggest is installing Fedora instead, where the driver can be reinstalled from the repositories. You'd still have to do it yourself but it's a lot more convenient than fetching the driver and compiling the module yourself. Alternatively, you could install something like Ubuntu, which updates the video driver without any user intervention.

Hi jay73, Thank you for your answer. In fact, I paid a few hundred dollars to use redhat enterprise linux and thought it would be more stable and had less updates. Now it seems all same as free Fedora and even worse since less people uses and less discussion on common problems I cannot imagine why linux don't have the nvidia driver and alsa driver preinstalled! They are common vedio and sound card, aren't they?

Anyway, can I download any small program to reinstall the vedio and sound card automatically everytime when I update to new kernels? I am really a newbie. Otherwise, I would write a program to do so.

Thanks again.

I use both Fedora and RHEL (in the form of CentOS) and I can assure you that there are less updates in RHEL than in Fedora and its more stable. Quite a lot of people use RHEL or related distros either as server OSes or on their desktops, so you are guaranteed that someone can help you out if you ask in the right places. As for the nvidia drivers, its Red Hat and Fedora policy not to include proprietary software in their distribution due to licensing issues and potential problems with lawsuits. Its the same on Windows, Microsoft does not ship the official nvidia driver with XP or Vista, you have to download and install it yourself.

If the kernel works fine for you, there may be no need to upgrade it if an upgrade causes problems with your graphics and sound modules. All you need to do is edit /etc/yum.conf and put

Thank you a lot for above information!!!

I don't have yum.conf file under /etc folder. Should I creat one and with only one line: "exclude=kernel*" ? Is this same as not selecting anything starting with "kernel" when the system is asking for update packages?

Having looked at your kernel version, it seems like you are running RHEL 4 which did not have yum by default. I am sure you can use the up2date GUI to configure updates to exclude the kernel.

None is available for RedHat/Fedora (or many other distributions) as far as I know. There are only two options: either you stick with one kernel and you skip the kernel updates or you don't but then you need to reinstall the drivers.

Yes, Fedora does have more (a lot more) updates than RedHat. Not surprisingly, because Fedora can be considered a beta release of the next RedHat. It's very stable for an experimental release, however, and I haven't run into any serious issues so far (after more than a year) although some minor tweaks may be required at times. I think that Fedora and CentOS make better choices for home users; RedHat is essentially an enterprise system.

Thank you for all the replies. I will just use what I have now and wait for every other kernel update to reduce the number of times to reinstall drivers

You should be able to use the nv driver with that card. This means only 2D, however, but there's no need to reinstall anything after a kernel update.