What I'd like to know is, of those of you who have successfully installed the nVidia drivers – either 61.11. or 66.29 – on Debian Sarge or Woody, what do you think the best method is? I've done much research on this subject as I am new to Linux. It seems to be a personal preference issue, however, I would like to know if anyone has used say, module-assist for Debian or something similar. I have an old P3 with a GeForce 2 that I installed the Ubuntu distro on. They have the 61.11 drivers in their repositories so you can use synaptic to install the drivers. It's really slick. You just select the package in synaptic and it automatically selects all the packages required to build and install the thing. You just sit back and watch. When it's done, you type 'glx-config enable' and it modifies the XF86Config-4 file with the appropriate values. Reboot and bam, it's all up and running. They even include the nvidia-settings app by default so you can go in and tweak it. Problem with Ubuntu is, that's about the only thing that worked without a hitch, and, it's seems very sluggish, even when I had it installed on my P4 with 1 gig of RAM. I'd like to get the nVidia 66.29 drivers installed on my main rig which has Debian Sarge on a P4 with a GeForce 6800. I noticed that there is a package in Debian's repositories that has the 66.29 binaries, however, when you select it, it doesn't mark any of the other packages normally required to setup and install the drivers. Has anyone used this method to install and, if so, what else do you need to do? Since I'm a newb, I don't really want to rebuild my kernel, however, I realize that eventually that's a skill I'll have to learn. Thanks for any input on this subject. I want to make sure I do this correctly so I don't have to re-install Debian, I like it the way it is now...

I just use the ones provided by Nvidia. I now use 6119. I tried upgrading to 2.6.10 which didn't work with 6629 though I haven't tried those with this kernel (2.6.8.1)

That's the same kernel I'm using. So you just downloaded the 61.19 run package from nVidia and followed their directions using the nVidia installer built-in to the file? I take it you did have the kernel-source and kernel-headers installed on your system to do this and edited the XF86Config-4 file yourself.? I may consider that option based on what you said about the 66.29s and 2.6 kernel issues. I tried this once before on an old Debian Woody system but could not get the module to build correctly using nVidia's installer. Thanks.

I just executed the .bin and then it had to compile the module itself. I compile my kernels myself so I had everything already don't know about those packages. But that's the way I did it. You can also use "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and set nvidia there so you don't have to edit a text file if you don't like that.

I see, well I sure don't have a problem with editing the text file, Lord knows I did it enough last time I went through this with the nVidia package

Well, I just made sure the kernel-header and kernel-source packages were installed and ran the nvidia installer (the downloaded *6111*.run binary). It did all the work and I have a nice beautiful display now and my GF 6800 is once again pumping out some serious pixels in DooM 3. I'm really starting to love Debian.

I'm still interested in what others have experienced if you care to share. Cheers.

I compile my own kernel from the source for debian rather than using the kernel tools and using the installer from NVidia gives no problems at all.

I did have a problem a few months ago when I transfered the installer from a cd that I had made in windows at work and it took me about 4 hours to work out that it wasn't marked as executable. Its always the simple things.

Everytime I update the kernel I have to run the installer again, but I just drop the in /opt (I found a use for it) and cd there and run it, no biggy.

I did have the installer complaining once that it was compiled on a different version to that of the kernel and so would not work (I had just done apt-get upgrade) but a kernel recompile later (about 2 minutes) , it worked fine.