I'm using Fedora17, kernel 3.3.0-8, Xorg 1.12
Running sgfxi gives error 198 (can't retrieve remote version) but I can run 'sgfxi -U' and 'sgfxi -R' (skips checking remote version).
Another issue is that (when running 'sgfxi -R') it gives error 226: Xorg 1.12 isn't supported in nvidia 295.33.
But us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/295.33/README/minimumrequirements.html says it is.
On the other hand, www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=176872 says there's a bug between the installer and kernel 3.3 so maybe I should wait anyway.
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thanks, I have to rely on people reporting when xorg version support is there or not, I'll update for 1.12/nvidia.

The stuff failing to download is on your end, it's usually a wan issue, sometimes wget requests fail due to network parameters that are totally out of my control.
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I'm not certain of this, well, kinda certain, but, Fedora 17 is still in beta, and, being in beta, it's still using the debug kernels (there are intermittent compilations without debug, but, you'd have to check koji to see if the kernel was actually compiled without debug).
Nvidia blobs won't work with debug kernels, so, either find a version without debug, or, wait till the F17 release.
I haven't used Nvidia drivers for quite some time, so, if you're testing sgfxi with Fedora 17, I, along with many others on the Fedora forums, would be interested if it works for you.
I still haven't installed Fedora 17. Anaconda gives my boxes the willies still. I'm waiting to see if the Beta RC3 cleans up some of the problems. I can't really do testing on my F16 boxes because they're production machines. Once F17 comes out, I may be able to do some testing.
BTW - Even though the same Mesa/Xorg versions in "siduction" won't run Blender, the Fedora 16 installs run it in all it's 3D glory. I'd like to find out why it runs in Fedora and not with Debian Sid.

Oh well, I'm getting off topic here. Back to other things.
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I gave a thought on installing the NVIDIA driver only to check if the video driver had anything to do with Flash from Adobe not working.
It turned out that the latest 11.2 plugin doesn't work with my Athlon XP (and actually it seems it's buggy for everyone and they won't fix it anymore) but I installed their 'fall-back' 10.3 version and it worked fine.
When using sid the difference in performance (even for my very modest card) was quite noticeable between nouveau and the vendor driver. But, although I obviously haven't tried the NVIDIA driver in F17, nouveau has absolutely given no issues at all (I didn't try any games, though).
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Just givin a feedback.
I installed the driver from the rpm-fusion repo. It actually supports kernel 3.3. And they are very neatly packaged.

One thing that I noticed is that we don't need to mess with GRUB parameters. What's done here to disable nouveau is simply blacklist it and it's asked that we backup and re-generate initramfs after installing the nvidia driver.
It worked fine for me.
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Just to update that actually we don't need to mess with the GL libraries either. For some reason the package seems to have not removed the xorg.conf I had before and I made things more complicated by running the nvidia-xconfig afterwards (I had to to get X working, and I didn't know the package structure then).
It uses just a very basic xorg.conf (only with the video driver) and fixes the path for the libraries with a custom file in xorg.conf.d folder.
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Just to confirm, this thread is not really about sgfxi at this point, correct?

I'm all for distro driver packages that actually work, that was a feature sorely missing when sgfxi was originally created.
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Oh no, you're right.
I was a bit sloppy with my last post as I just wanted to rectify the previous, not precise post.

Regarding sgfxi, what I learned is that with the rpmfusion packages there's no need to add kernel parameters in GRUB as we end up with just nouveau blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d
But that sure isn't all as the package has its scripts and I didn't check what it does while installing. So maybe someone could test in Debian, if it's the case, if the NVIDIA driver works just by blacklisting nouveau without adding kernel parameters to GRUB (or not, as it works well the way it is).

Another thing I thought, is that for NVIDIA there isn't really a need to create a dummy xorg.conf file beforehand in a basic situation like mine.
But I don't know sgfxi's history so maybe it's needed for some more complicated situations or for the ATI driver. This is just a thought as I wouldn't be capable of giving any solid suggestions on this issue.

All-in-all, I started this topic thinking on using sgfxi but yes, the NVIDIA packages in rpmfusion for Fedora seem very well done.
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in a sense, there was never a real excuse for bad packaging, the varioius gfx installer scripts that worked and solved these problems have all the steps required, and those could just as well be n the post/pre install package scripts, that's how sgfxi works, pre install steps, install, post install steps.

All the grub etc stuff is in sgfxi precisely because blacklisting along did NOT work, and it specifically did not work in fedora. Fedora is the actual reason for a lot of that logic to be honest.

It's too much work to track distros that release often and change core things often, like fedora and ubuntu, so I don't do it, the user base is too small to warrant that amount of time.

However, any specific modifications suggested by users of those distros are always welcome and if coherent and ideally with code logic, will be used to update the methods for that distro. sgfxi has distro specific options at every key step, so it's not that hard changing things per distro.

The only actual live testing I do is on debian, sid/testing, at least on an ongoing basis, though I do have a test box setup with all the versions and distros, but it takes so long to upgrade the distros each time I don't usually do it. Especially fedora, that rarely upgrades cleanly, sad to say. So I tend to avoid the live testing now, time is too valuable to me at this point in my life.
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