Downgrading from NVIDIA 304.43 to 295.71 on CentOS 6

The latest upgrade in 'elrepo' updates the NVIDIA drivers from version 295.71 to version 304.43. However, it ain't no bed of roses. On my CentOS 6.3 box, 3D performance under Wine took a massive hit, to the point where even sound playback was affected.

However, it's easy to just roll back the NVIDIA driver upgrades and get on with your life. First, grab the latest working version from elrepo:

wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/kmod-nvidia-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/nvidia-x11-drv-32bit-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/nvidia-x11-drv-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

Now, remove the new, buggy 304.43 drivers:

yum remove nvidia-x11-drv kmod-nvidia nvidia-x11-drv-32bit

Beware that uninstalling kmod-nvidia may take quite a while. Finally, install the fresh, old drivers:

rpm -Uvh kmod-nvidia-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm \
nvidia-x11-drv-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm \
nvidia-x11-drv-32bit-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

Reboot. Commence life.

minimalistic laptop setup

I recently fell in love with i3wm, a tile window manager, so I wanted to format my computer and have a bare-minimum installation (instead of running gnome in the background). I checked out tile-window-managers after using pywo, and wanted to 'go the extra mile'.

This resulted in me downloading the minimal CD from ubuntu (12.04) and installing X, i3 and a smallest login manager I could find.

I just ordered the ASUS UX31A and so I need to install everything from scratch again, so what I did was to create a github project with bash file installing all the nice small packages from the first time.

https://github.com/charnley/ubuntu-mts

Here is an outline of the install script, which basicly uses apt-get (why I choose ubuntu) and installs everything needed.


Afterwards all the setup RC's, icon, font setup is done via setup.sh.

I really like this setup for a fast on-the-go geeky setup, especially on a 13" where room on the screen is limited.