Installing NVIDIA drivers on 64-bit RHEL 6

I got a new machine that had RHEL 6 stuck on it. Installing the NVIDIA drivers caused me just a little grief. After NVIDIA’s driver installer told me the Nouveau driver was in the way, I found these instructions. My steps below are based on these, though I ran into one extra hiccup because I’ve got a 64-bit OS installed:

1. Installed kernel headers and compiler:

   yum install gcc kernel-devel
   reboot
   

2. Temporarily changed runlevel in /etc/inittab to 3 instead of 5. After I got everything working I switched this back to get a graphic login manager.
3. Get Nouveau out of the way:

   sed -i '/root=/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau vga=791|' /boot/grub/grub.conf
   echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
   mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname  -r)-nouveau.img
   dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
   yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau
   reboot
   

4. Ran the installer with no X server running:

   sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-SOME-VERSION-OR-OTHER.run
   

   It failed with this message:

   Could not compile 'gcc-version-check.c'. Please be
   sure you have your Linux distribution's gcc and libc
   development packages installed.
   

5. I scratched my head and went to sleep.
6. The next day I unpacked the installer with:

   sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-SOME-VERSION-OR-OTHER.run -x
   

7. I looked in kernel/confest and found where gcc-version-check.c was compiled. I tried compiling it myself with

   gcc gcc-version-check.c -o gcc-version-check
   

   and I got this output:

   /usr/include/gnu/stubs.h:9:27: error: gnu/stubs-64.h: No such file or directory
   

   A little sleuthing showed that stubs-64.h is included in glibc-devel, which I needed to install

   yum install glibc-devel
   

8. And then:

   sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-SOME-VERSION-OR-OTHER.run