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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Desktop Hacks
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Chapter 11, Hardware
#100 Accelerate Your Gaming
HACK
To find out your version of gcc, run this:
foo@bar:~$ gcc -v
Finally, to find out your version of X, run this:
foo@bar:~$ X -version
Before you begin to install your driver, you should back up your X configu-
ration file, as it might be overwritten when you configure the binary driver.
This file is called XF86Config or XF86Config-4 and is usually found in /etc/
X11. You should copy the file to a safe place as a backup:
root@bar:~# cp /etc/X11/XF86Config* /root/xconfigbackup/
Installing the NVIDIA Driver
One of the most popular closed source graphics drivers in use is the unified
NVIDIA driver. Many people have chosen NVIDIA cards for their impres-
sive performance and driver support, and because the full range of features
on the cards are available in the Linux driver. You can download a single
unified driver that supports all NVIDIA cards at http://www.nvidia.com/
linux.
Once you have downloaded the driver package, you need to make it execut-
able so that you can run it. Type the following commands as root:
foo@bar:~# chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-x.x-xxxx-pkg1.run
Before you run a graphics driver installer, you should ensure
that you have exited X by logging out, and if you have a graph-
ical login manager, you should shut this down, too. Using
GDM as an example, you can do this in Debian with
/etc/
init.d/gdm stop
. In Red Hat you can do the same ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata