On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 12:36:07AM -0500, Kevin Thomas wrote:
> Ok, I jujst got a brand new Dell XPS laptop a few days ago. I
> managed to install Windows 7 and SL 6.1 side by side in a dual boot
> setup.  This laptop has the core i7 processor, which means it has
> integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, but it also has a 2GB Nvidia
> GT540M (with optimus) discrete card as well.  I know that optimus is
> not natively supported yet, but according to the SL forums, the
> generic nvidia driver can be installed instead (kmod-nvidia). The
> instructions said to just do "yum install kmod-nvidia".  This
> installed the drivers for me and when I rebooted, I saw the
> plymouth-rings splash screen for the first time ever, but the system
> hung.  I restarted again and pushed ESC to see the messages and the
> screen flickered a few times and it stopped on "registering binary
> handler for windows applications" Some googling informed me that
> this was due to the wine service being enabled, so I disabled it and
> restarted.  This time, it got hung on "starting atd:" and the screen
> flickered a few times.  I have a feeling that if I disabled atd, it
> would just hang on the next service. I had to uninstall the
> kmod-nvidia package just to boot my system again.  There has to be a
> way to get the nvidia driver working.  Any help would be
> appreciated.
> 
> Kevin

I have a two-year-old Dell laptop, a Latitude E6500. To get the Nvidia
driver working on this (single-boot, Scientific Linux 6), I used the
elrepo:

yum --enablerepo=elrepo install kmod-nvidia nvidia-x11-drv
nvidia-x11-drv-32bit

Good resource:
http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia

Best of luck,
Barry