I’ve been tinkering with kernel options a lot lately, and the downside of that is that I have to rebuild the Nvidia driver every time too, since it refuses to jump from one rebuild to the next. Perhaps there’s a way around that, and I just haven’t discovered it yet.

But in the mean time, I did find some nifty flags for the Nvidia installer package that make it do its job without all the extraneous interrogation. If you work for Nvidia and you’re reading this … it’s a very nice interface, thank you, but something of a drag after about the fifth or sixth rebuild. You get a little tired of acknowledging this and that and the other.

To get the 96.43.07 installer (and probably others) to do just that — shut up and build — try these options.

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.07-pkg1.run -aqsN

The -a flag accepts the license, which you otherwise should read and understand. -q means no questions please, and that’s what we’re really after here. -s is silent, so there’s no output (think: ncurses interface) unless there’s an error, and the -N flag skips over any attempts to download a precompiled driver. It’s possible that one of those implies another, but that’s the combination that works for me.

So basically, barring incident, the driver should unspool itself, then configure, build, install and insert the module without any further insolence. Saves time too, which is the real benefit I’m after. 🙂