nvidia drivers pain then joy
I have a GeForce 8600 GTS so I need nVidia’s binary driver. (Well, for values of “need” which include needing to run at full resolution and have a tolerable display.) Just downloading and running the installer from nVidia has worked up to now for me with Slackware, but not this time, after I had compiled my own kernel. I think the problem was that I could get it to see either the correct kernel headers or the correct kernel source but not both at the same time. I’m not sure about that, though. I’m not even sure why it would need anything but the headers. In any case, even after searching the interweb and trying various installer options, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make it work without a lot of hand-holding.
Then I remembered seeing an install script at SlackBuilds.org for it. Five minutes later, all was good. I love that site. While I’m plugging it, I’ll mention that I had a little trouble with their script for the backgammon game gnubg; I got a version of gnubg without 3D board support. Within minutes of posting a build log to their mailing list, the script maintainer got back to me, saying that I was missing the package that adds gl support for gtk and that he’d forgotten to list it as an optional dependency. Again, five minutes later I had everything recompiled and working perfectly. Those people are good!