Installing Nvidia driver on Lenny

Hi All,

Warning: This may screw up your X server. I or my blog is not responsible for it.

This post explains how to install Nvidia driver on Lenny.

Include contrib and non-free repositories through the software sources through UI.

Command wise - update /etc/apt/sources.list to include this line
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free
and then apt-get update

Then follow this procedure (Using Synaptic):

1. Install nvidia-glx driver
2. Install nvidia-kernel (this has to match your kernel version)
3. Install nvidia-kernel-common

Once this is done - then

1. Install nvidia-xconfig

Open "gnome-terminal" and run "nvidia-xconfig" as root.

If you have 2 monitors - you can split your view using (will write about this with pictures sometime later)

1. Install "nvidia-settings"

Note:

1. Nvidia does not hot deploy kernel modules. A restart is required.
2. Many a times after the restart - the X server is screwed up.Its better to backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file before implementing this post.

Hope 1: Hope you can solve dependency issues.

I will be writing another post to fix xorg.conf sometime later.

Keep reading...

Tc,
Ananth S Gouri