X crashes after installing Nvidia driver on CentOS or RHEL

Recently I’ve been having trouble with the Nvidia driver on CentOS 6.

Opening any kind of app that uses the GPU like Google Chrome, Firefox or even Nvidia’s own nvidia-settings causes X to crash and restart.

Luckily, I’ve found the solution, and it has to do with libglx.so.

Navigate to

<

pre>/usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/

<

pre> and have a look at the contents with

ls -al

.

You’ll likely see something like this:

u@Host151 /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions $ ls -al
[...]
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   148120 Jan 24  2013 libextmod.so
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root   467513 Feb 10 12:55 libglx.so
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 12258728 Feb 10 11:33 libglx.so.346.46
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root    31248 Jan 24  2013 librecord.so

What you’ll now want to do is remove the smaller of the libglx.so, and create a symbolic link so that the operating system will use the correct version.
In my case, the Nvidia driver is 346.46 so the filename has that extension.

Run:

$ sudo mv libglx.so libglx.so.old
$ sudo ln -s libglx.so.346.46 libglx.so

Now, reload X and enjoy using all your apps as usual!