nvidia-config-display misbehavior

[Neal Becker]

On Wednesday 18 November 2009, Stewart Adam wrote:
> On 2009/11/18 1:27 PM, Neal Becker wrote:
> > Since nvidia driver is currently not working well with my system, I
> > wanted to give nouveau another try.  I edited xorg.conf, changing from
> > nvidia to nouveau, then did nvidia-config-display disable.  Then telinit
> > 3, telinit 5. Surprise!  No X.
> >
> > After investigating, I found that every time I run telinit, nvidia script
> > will _rewrite xorg.conf_!
> >
> > Imagine my surprise. nvidia-config-display disable doesn't actually
> > disable nvidia.  The only reliable way to disable (temporarily) is rename
> > the kernel module.  (I don't want to yum remove nvidia stuff, last thing
> > I need to is have to have a working network connection to restore it)
> >
> > Why would anyone want to type 'nvidia-config-display disable', only to
> > have it magically re-enable itself?
> 
> This is the expected (and documented) behavior:
> http://rpmfusion.org/Package/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia#head-ba705670506fd0e4b957d
> 0609fb0c2839dbf2563
> 
> nvidia-config-display will only temporarily disable the driver, to
> permanently disable you need to set livna-config-display's "active" state
>  to "off". I know it's not the best behavior form a user friendlyness
> perspective, but it's the only option as otherwise, this situation will
> become pretty common:
> 1. User runs "yum update" and grabs the latest kernel without kmod
> 2. User shuts down for the night
> 3. User powers up next morning
> 4. Kmod doesn't exist for new kernel, "nvidia-config-display disable"
>  called 5. Drivers are never re-enabled
> 
> By having the nvidia service call "nvidia-config-display enable" by default
> and "nvidia-config-display disable" when a kmod is missing, we can have the
> nvidia driver automatically disable itself when a kmod is missing and then
> re-enable itself for the user when the appropriate kmod is installed.
> 
> Stewart
> 

I would have never guess that.

Usage: livna-config-display [OPTIONS]
Options:

General:
  -h, --help
        Display this help message
  -v, --verbose
        Increase verbosity
  --gui
        Use graphical interface (default)
  --tui
        Use text interface
  --active on|off
        Should livna-config-display edit configuration files?
...

That description of --active sounds nothing like a switch to disable the 
driver.