[PLUG] Programs won't launch after going back to nouveau driver

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:35:35 -0800
Daniel Hedlund <daniel at digitree.org> dijo:

>On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:17, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>
>wrote:
>> So I reinstalled mesa-libGL and it recreated the link that I had
>> renamed. WTH? Of course, recreating the link means Fontmatrix is back
>> telling me that it can't find libnvidia-tls.so.260.19.21.
>
>Hmm...maybe the nvidia driver registered itself with the
>'alternatives' database.  Check out the /etc/alternatives/ directory
>and see if you the lib* files are listed in there.  If so then you
>might be able to run commands similar to the following to display and
>change where the symlink points:
>$ alternatives --display libGL.so.1
>$ alternatives --config libGL.so.1

the /etc/alternatives/ folder has a lot of stuff (half of it is Java),
but nothing at all related to video drivers. (But it's interesting to
find out about folders that previously I had no ken of.)

>When you uninstalled the nvidia drivers, did you just start deleting
>files or did you run 'make uninstall'?  If not then you might try
>downloading NVIDIA's tar.gz file, 'configure' and 'make uninstall' it;
>it might reset the symlinks in the process.

I ran the nouveau driver exclusively after installing Fedora 11 x86_64
a year ago. I continued with it until I was experiencing problems
getting the laptop to display a screen with the classroom projectors at
PSU. So I installed the nVidia proprietary drivers. To do so I used
Yumex, as I already had the rpmfusion repository enabled.

I couldn't get the nVidia drivers to work either, so I uninstalled them
in order to go back to the nouveau driver. Uninstalling was more
complex than merely uninstalling the package with Yumex, because you
have to undo the nouveau-blacklist file that the nVidia installer sets
up. Eventually I got the nouveau driver working again. I did not test
the Fontmatrix or ksysguard programs at this time.

But I still couldn't get the nouveau driver to work correctly with the
projectors, so I reinstalled the nVidia driver. In the process of
uninstalling the nVidia drivers the first time I learned that the
*correct* way to install them is by downloading them from nvidia.com
and installing with the built-in script. Doing so installs the
nvidia-install and nvidia-uninstall scripts. Supposedly this method of
uninstalling fixes everything. (Hah!)

So when I uninstalled the nVidia drivers the second time I ran the
nvidia-uninstall script. I still had to rename the xorg.conf file that
the nVidia install script had created. 

Sorry I am so late in replying here. I had a medical crisis where I
was barely conscious upon arrival that the emergency room. I just
got home a couple hours ago after spending the past two days in the
ICU.