I’m a real big fan of nVidia’s Linux drivers for their GPUs and have installed them numerous times with CentOS 5. I just recently installed them under Red hat 6 (RHEL 6) and happened to notice a warning by the nVidia driver that Nouveau was already installed and needed to be removed first. Further investigation reveals that Fedora & the latest version of RHEL 6 are including Nouveau at the initial ramdisk so not only do you need to create your own modprobe.conf blacklist file but you also need to add a line on the end of your grub.conf file to tell the ramdisk not to load Nouveau at boot up.

First, creating a modprobe blacklist file to prevent the kernel from loading the Nouveau kernel module. You could easily add blacklist nouveau to any ole modprobe.conf file but you never know when your linux distribution may overwrite your modified file w/ the next update. You’re better off to just create your own modprobe blacklist file and dropping it inside /etc/modprobe.d/ folder. I went ahead and followed some directions I stumbled upon on the interwebs and created a file called /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nouveau.conf.

I then added the following to that file…

blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0

Once that was done, I then needed to modify my /etc/grub.conffile so the initial ramdisk would stop loading Nouveau too. To do this I added rdblacklist=nouveauto my kernel vmlinuz line like such…

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kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.14.1.el6.x86_64 ro root=UUID=209502fb-f4f0-4755-a275-de807916fb76 rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us crashkernel=128M rhgb rdblacklist=nouveau
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Oh ya, I always remove the “quiet” at the end of the line too. Something about watching all of the modules load…

Here’s a couple links as usual:

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/260.19.36/README/commonproblems.html
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2009/howto-install-nvidia-driver-on-fedora-and-just-disable-the-nouveau-driver/