Tag Archives: Nvidia

Installing Nvidia driver in Debian Lenny

If you’re running Debian testing (aka “Lenny”) which brings no Nvidia driver packages – only the legacy ones – or like to install the latest drivers by Nvidia for Etch, you’ll be running into problems: the Nvdia installer won’t find everything necessary for compiling the kernel module. So, here’s a small HOWTO:

First, download the latest Nvidia driver (by the time of writing it’s version 100.14.11) corresponding to your architecture (i386 or amd64) from the Nvidia ftp site (just look here). Then, make sure the following packages are installed:

  • build-essential
  • linux-headers-2.6 (corresponding to your kernel)
  • pkg-config
  • xserver-xorg-dev

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Beryl with Feisty & Nvidia

I’d like to point out that there’s no logical reason to use Beryl as your default window manager – except for fun and eye candy! As Ubuntu Feisty makes the task of installing Beryl very easy, I’d wanted to give it a try. So, what do we need to do?

The following is intended for Nvidia based graphic boards with GeForce XXXX chip. If you have a different graphic chip you need to install the specific drivers for your video device. It is important that those drivers support 3D acceleration.

My video card is a Gainward BLISS with GeForce 7600GT chip, so I can use the latest Nvidia driver that comes with Feisty. You may choose between Nvidia driver version 1.0-9755, 1.0-9631 and 1.0-7184. Please see this Nvidia page to check which driver version supports your video card. You’ll need at least one of the 1.0-9xxx driver versions for use with Beryl.

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My Vista Experience, Pt. 3

Lately, I had some trouble installing a new Nvidia display driver:
During installation of this driver Vista told me that “Age of Empires II Update 2″ was not compatible with Vista… Er…? OK…..? The Nvidia installer ended without actually installing the driver and Vista then asked if it should try installing the program with recommended settings? Well, go ahead I thought… Now the Nvidia installer was sure it wasn’t running on Vista and quit. I rebooted and tried my luck again – no success. Still the installer quit because it could “run on Vista only” – though I was quite sure I was running Vista at this time! I guess the “recommended” settings emulate some kind of Windows XP environment – but I couldn’t turn this off again for this Nvidia installer. Well, I’m sure there would have been a solution to this but I wasn’t in the mood searching for it.

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Edgy: recent kernel update & nvidia driver

The recent security fixes for Edgy included a kernel update to version 2.6.17-11, which left me with a non starting X server. However, I booted the old kernel and everything was fine. So I had a look at the problem.

I’m using the default Ubuntu nVidia drivers (nvidia-glx package) but the kernel update did not automatically update the linux-restricted-modules package, so the nVidia kernel module was missing for the new kernel 2.6.17-11. Installing this package manually resolved the problem and now I’m running the new kernel. I think, it should be added automatically when updating… (Kind of déjà vu from Dapper?)