As you can see from a previous entry, I’ve been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Beta 1) on my laptop for a while. It worked well out of the box once I configured my own boot loader for it. The laptop has a Nvidia 9300GS graphics card but I was unable to do heavy 3D work with the Nouveau driver so I installed the Nvidia binary driver.
This caused my laptop to die flashing at boot as it would load the Nouveau driver from the initramfs and then Xorg would try and load the Nvidia binary from the hard drive. To fix this I added the following line to my kernel option in grub 2.
rdblacklist=nouveau
This blocks the module from loading at boot which is what I really needed. It took me about half an hour to find this one line so I hope by writing this it won’t take you so long.
set root=(hd0,3)
menuentry "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta" {
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-19.el6.x86_64 root=/dev/sda9 ro rdblacklist=nouveau
initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-19.el6.x86_64.img
}
