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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 ...