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.