Downloaded the Linux Fedora 12 release yesterday and I have to say its much better than Fedora 11 was on its release. I seem to have got nearly everything working. Drivers for my NVidia graphics card were not available on the release of Fedora 11 and I expected the same for this new release.

 

However I seem to have got them working with only a couple of problems and the 3D accelerated software (Google Earth and some of the 3D Screensavers) that I have tried works much better proving that the drivers are installed and working. 

 

I always use the NVidia drivers from NVidia themselves. Downloadable from Here. To run this binary that installs the drivers certain things need to be setup.

  1. The installer must be run with the x server stopped. I do this by opening a command line terminal and typing 'sudo init 3' (Assuming that you are configured on the sudoers list, if not the I think it would be 'su -c init 3' and you would need to know the root password.)
  2. Once the x server is shut down login with root priviledges.
  3. You may need the gcc compiler installed, this can be done from yum: 'yum install gcc'.
  4. The kernel devel and source packages are also required. I am not going to give instuctions on how to do this here as I copied the information from elsewhere myself. The instuctions can be found Here. I realise these instuctions are for Fedora 9 but the steps are the same. Using Yum for all steps this is really easy. This website is an excellent resource for setting up a great Fedora environment, I certainly would not have carried on using Linux without this site to refer to. 
  5. Once these steps are done it should be possible to run the NVidia bin file and the drivers will be installed. Enjoy, Try installing Google Earth first and running a before and after test to really see the difference.I needed to change SELinux to 'permissive' to get Google Earth to run.