.. and messin' and messin.
Hi there coffee lounge lurkers.
You would think that after 2 years revelling in several distros, and having installed NVIDIA drivers a' la recipe le techimoe, and apt-get, and nvidia site instructions, with various mostly unpredictable things happening on the way, it should be a breeze by now - but I still find it tough. So swallow hard and boot up sans a GUI screen to do the deed on X11.
I can hear the groans already, but GUIs with kate editors are so useful and flexible for command line wimps like me. So I now want to have a micro-rant.
When I see opaque stuff like..
"/lib/modules/2.6.22.5-10-bigsmp/build/include/linux/kernel.h does not exist
,I can guess that the NVIDIA install needs kernel headers that do not happen by themselves. I guess I was pampered by Synaptic where you could search "nvidia", and have a whole list of kernel-related stuff roll out. OK - so back to the GUI and lets have YAST. Oh dear.. The 10.3 - Packman Repository fails. So does the 10.3 - VideoLan. eh??. The DVD from openSUSE is only 4 days old. I haven't even given back 1:1 to the bit-torrent share yet. After the interminable wait, the 'nvidia' search reveals several 'Nouveau X11' things -- but right now I do not want to be learning the latest state of X11 reverse engineering. I just want openGL to run without trading off on the video bandwidth from the GeForce card. We need the driver - proprietary or not!

The 'other' message was to the effect that the kernel source path is wrong. eh?? I would have to read some before knew how to change it, even if I knew what to change it to.
I know that SUSE is probably a competent distro, and I have nearly forgiven it for the 10.1 tangle. This box already has dual-boot Debian Etch 4.0, and W*nd*ws. We only decided to add SUSE because SUSE10.2 was known to have the correct libraries for the Labview application.
This should have been easy. Its now turning into a bit of a project just navigating this YAST-YUM thing. I know I can do it eventually, but I just wish it was easier to fight a SUSE install into the kind of slick tuned-up thing I know it can be.
G