Sorry for the long absence. I was taken into hospital mid October and am only now starting to feel human again, having had all the tubes removed.

I'd fallen behind with Fedora and tried (without success) to download the 3.5Gb DVD for FC12. So, on an impulse, I tried running preupgrade, a program which purports to upgrade the system. It failed when trying to start X-windows.

Background. Prior to my last upgrade (hardware), I've always gone for two year old graphics cards to ensure the drivers are stable with Linux. This time I installed an Nvidia 9500GT card, in the hope of running such programs as google earth etc. In terms of drivers, I decided to try the commercial driver provided by Nvidia, see Nvidia site. They (Nvidia) don't open source their drivers so it's hard for Fedora to integrate them. As I pointed out previously, this means that each time the kernel is updated, I need to rebuild the driver since it is closely tied into the kernel. Plain hassle. Not good for Nvidia too IMHO, pissing off customers. Anyway, where was I.

I can normally break into the boot up sequence to tag on additional commands to the grub command. I use this to get to run level 3, where I can rebuild the graphics card driver. Not so this time. What to do? After pondering I planned to

1. Boot into the outgoing FC11
2. Uninstall the Nvidia driver
3. Install the rpms ( see this dated, but valid, blog
4. Reboot back into the upgrade... and see

Small chance that the kernel and rpms would match, but I tried it. Yes, it worked. What I'd missed was the manual intervention. Now, instead of me updating the driver based on any combination of kernel and driver, the guys at livna were doing it! All this does is put out of sync a kernel update and the driver update. I now need to note when I get a kernel update, boot into the old kernel for a couple of days until I note a new version of kmod-nvidia-PAE has been installed. Then I can revert to the default boot kernel.