[elrepo] Announcement: EL5 and EL6 New package nvidia-detect [Version 310.32]

[Phil Perry]

Announcing the release of new nvidia-detect packages into the EL5 and 
EL6 elrepo repositories:

http://elrepo.org/tiki/nvidia-detect

nvidia-detect is a utility to detect supported NVIDIA graphics cards and 
recommend the correct NVIDIA graphics driver to use.

The following packages are available to install:

EL5:
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el5.elrepo.i386.rpm
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el5.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el5.elrepo.src.rpm

EL6:
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el6.elrepo.i686.rpm
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
nvidia-detect-310.32-1.el6.elrepo.src.rpm

nvidia-detect was conceived after NVIDIA recently dropped support for 
older 6xx and 7xxx series cards from the current driver. Some users 
upgraded to the latest NVIDIA driver and found their older hardware was 
no longer supported by the latest driver release.

Each release of nvidia-detect will correspond in version number to the 
NVIDIA driver that it can detect supported devices for. nvidia-detect 
may be used in one of two ways:

1. nvidia-detect may be run from the command line to detect supported 
NVIDIA graphics cards and make a recommendation for the correct driver 
for the detected card.

Users who wish to avoid the recent situation when updating their NVIDIA 
graphics drivers may first instal/update to the latest version of 
nvidia-detect and use it to determine if the pending NVIDIA graphics 
driver release supports their hardware.

Users of new installs may use nvidia-detect to select the correct NVIDIA 
driver for their new install.

Example output from nvidia-detect run from the command line:

$ nvidia-detect
Probing for supported NVIDIA devices...
Found: [10de:0ca3] NVIDIA Corporation GT215 [GeForce GT 240]
This device requires the current 310.32 NVIDIA driver (kmod-nvidia).

$ nvidia-detect
Probing for supported NVIDIA devices...
Found: [10de:0392] NVIDIA Corporation G73 [GeForce 7600 GS]
This device requires the NVIDIA legacy 304.xx driver (kmod-nvidia-304xx).

2. nvidia-detect may be run from within a script and will return the 
following codes:

0: No supported devices found
1: Device supported by the current NVIDIA release driver
2: Device supported by the NVIDIA legacy 96.xx driver
3: Device supported by the NVIDIA legacy 173.xx driver
4: Device supported by the NVIDIA legacy 304.xx driver

We may in the future make nvidia-detect a requirement of the 
nvidia-x11-drv package and run it from the %post install script to 
notify the system administrator by echoing a warning to the console if 
the installed/updated NVIDIA driver does not support the current 
hardware. The kernel module already logs a warning to syslog.


The nvidia-detect project is maintained at our github repository and 
contributions are welcome:

https://github.com/elrepo/packages/tree/master/nvidia-detect

Bugs for nvidia-detect should be reported at http://elrepo.org/bugs

Thank you,

The ELRepo Team.