On 03/09/2010 05:23 PM, Carlos Mennens wrote:

Is it a bad idea to install nVidia display drivers manually by downloading them from nvidia.com and installing it by hand...or should I use 'Pacman'? I read that I could mess up my system by manually installing packages and should always use Pacman.

Thoughts / Suggestions?

-Carlos

Don't you want to be assured that the version of nvidia on your machine *works* with the rest of the Arch packages you have installed? Don't you want to find out automatically when there's bug fixes or new versions of the nvidia drivers available? Or automatically get rebuilds of the driver when needed due to other packages that have been upgraded (such as the kernel)? In other words, I would think that you absolutely would *not* want to download and install the drivers manually. (I'm not even clear why you think it would be a good idea?) So yes, by all means: $ pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils DR

On 03/09/2010 03:23 PM, Carlos Mennens wrote:

Is it a bad idea to install nVidia display drivers manually by downloading them from nvidia.com and installing it by hand...or should I use 'Pacman'? I read that I could mess up my system by manually installing packages and should always use Pacman.

Thoughts / Suggestions?

-Carlos

What's the point of having a package manager if you don't want to use it? On Arch, it's not like you'll be behind much anyway. The only reason the nvidia drivers aren't current isn't because the new drivers can literally melt your video card (something which the package's maintainer knew and you might not).