NVIDIA video driver

[Walter Garcia-Fontes]

I posted some time ago a question on turning off the CPU fan of my
Precision 690 after booting Fedora, something that happens when booting
for instance into Windows XP, as I noticed by chance since I still
have a partition but I don't boot into it too much. 

According to some private help that I received, it turns out that the
fan making the noise is the graphics card (256Mb nVidia Quadro FX3500
Graphics Card). He told me that updating to the newest driver I would
get the same behaviour as in XP. 

I went to Dell's web page, and downloaded
dell-nvidia-8756-5dkms.i386.rpm 

Trying to install it, it told me that I didn't have the kernel
sources. So I dowloaded them, but trying to install it again, it told
me that it was already installed. So I tried to reboot, and : no
xwindows! It would tell me that it couldn't start it because of a
graphics driver problem. 

I tried to download the driver directly from the NVIDIA web page and
compile it myself, but it would always abort, complaining that it
couldn't find the kernel headers or sources, though I swear they were
in the right places (and I entered the path manually using an option
that they provide in the script). 

I tried a couple of other things, like downloading the driver from the
livna repository, and one of these things worked, as I could finally
start the x server (and gnome), but I don't know what solved it since
I tried a couple of different things and some of them remotedly. 

Anyway, now I don't get the initial fedora splash screen (I took the
rgb parameter out of the line in the grub.conf), no big deal, and I
also get an error at boot up telling me something like:

dkms - autoinstalling nvidia driver
...
bad install - build failed!

or something like this, but the x system starts ok, and the fan turns
off!

I would be grateful on any clues on all this... Or how to get rid of
the above error, just in case. 

-- 
Walter Garcia-Fontes
Barcelona