The installation of the NVIDIA drivers under Linux can be quite easy
in itself. However, there is a little more to it sometimes than
just unpacking the driver files.
Since certain versions of the NVIDIA drivers require upgrading your
XFree86 to work, I've included some material on installing XFree86.
If upgrading XFree86 is necessary for you, you can read this document
but also carefully read the information at
XFree86.org.
The NVIDIA driver is only concerned with installing the OpenGL libGL
library. But since there is more to a complete OpenGL installation than
just libGL, I cover the installation of defacto standard OpenGL add-on
libraries like GL Utility (libGLU) and GL Utility Toolkit (libglut).
Going a little beyond the basics, I cover the installation of some
other libraries you might want to consider:
TrollTech's Qt C++ Library
and the Java language
Java 3D API.