OK, a new kernel came in, and on my F12 production machines, all it took was a reboot and the akmod-nvidia rebuilt the kmod-nvidia driver, no muss, no fuss.
On the sgfxi test box, I got a black screen with blinking cursor, which means the kmod-nvidia driver wasn't automatically rebuilt by the akmod. The matching kmod-nvidia was available, and updated during the yum update, but didn't survive the reboot, meaning the akmod didn't act as it was supposed to.
After running sgfxi -s all was back to normal, and it even kept the modifications I made to xorg.conf to accommodate my twin monitors (except ModulePath see below).
inxi -G on the other hand is no longer showing the GLX Renderer, GLX Version or Direct Rendering. All of them showing N/A. This, even though Nvidia-Settings is showing that the driver is installed and working.
Wait, xorg.conf is not showing the ModulePath="usr/lib/xorg/extensions/nvidia" line in Section "Files", I adding it and rebooting.
OK, now inxi -G is showing the Card, Module 190.53 and Rendering correctly. This is strange because I didn't see an error telling me it couldn't find the Nvidia driver, but simply putting the line into the ModulePath allowed inxi -G to see it.
I'm going to try sgfxi -N nouveau a bit later and compare what it does to what I do when I revert the driver back to nouveau in cli.
The steps I take in cli:
Clean up /boot/grub/grub.conf - get rid of blacklist and vmalloc options.
then execute:
yum remove kmod-nvidia*
yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia*
rm /etc/X11/xorg*
rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
I'll let you know how it works.
Also, I still can't find an installable F13. Fedora split F13 (now development) and rawhide, so rawhide no longer freezes waiting for a new release. I'm anxious to see how well nouveau handles 3D.
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vmalloc is supposed to be removed when moving to nouveau?

If so I'll have to add that too.

The path to the modules is still not default, but what happened there is that nvidia loaded but glx did not because xorg didn't know where to look.

nvidia is running, just without the glx stuff, I have checked this many times.

For fedora it should update the xorg.conf to add that line if it's missing I'd say.

That only affects the -s distro driver though, the regular sgfxi nvidia doesn't need that.

I updated and corrected some x killing stuff, both arch and fedora have a really weird thing when you kill the x process, it respawns it immediately, starting x, from console, which is disconcerting when running sgfxi.

So that is bypassed now, and sgfxi uses init 3 to kill x, since fedora x is init 5, that's easy, and init 5 is the x start command. Not perfect but it sort of works ok.

There is no equivalent that I, or apparently anyone else on the internet can find to /etc/init.d for gdm, and /usr/sbin/gdm-stop does exactly the opposite, it starts it as soon as it is stopped, very annoying.

so best course for users is to simple do: ctrl alt f1, then let sgfxi take them to init 3 from there, which will kill x/gdm.

The nouveau stuff is a real pain too, it requires very specific treatment. Anyone who tells me that nouveau is less invasive then nvidia is imo smoking crack.

Currently now nvidia should largely be working, except for that xorg.conf nvidia file path addon for sgfxi -s fedora, for debian, ubuntu, fedora, mint, and arch.
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I don't think it is necessary to remove vmalloc, I just do it to return everything to it's pre-installed state.


yes it is, it just didn't show up in inxi, until I added the line in xorg.

I had to reinstall today, messed up install playing with other things. It's ok, I can start looking at it again in its pristine state. They just released another alpha of F13, just finished downloading and burning the DVD and hope to install it tomorrow. Hopefully, everyone will leave me alone so I can get some testing done.
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