Since 7.3 I have always used the tar balls and did so yesterday with no problems for my Geforce 4mx card. unpack the kernel and GLX tarballs an run make install as root in each then edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config file to replace "nv" or in my case "versa" with "nvidia" and also look for the other things to add or remove as per the nvidia README.
The problems that I (and many others) had under 7.3 seem to have gone. Sam.
