Installing nVidia graphics card
 

I've just purchased a nVidia GeForce 6200 AGP8X graphics card to replace the on-board SIS graphics chip on my ageing Linux box. As this is the first time I will have attempted a graphics upgrade, I've been Googling for a How-to for Debian but have only been able to find quite old docs for XFree86 versions of Debian (even on LQ).
Can anyone point me in the right direction for this upgrade or tell me how to proceed?

Install the card, then install the nVidia driver. It will automagically pick up your videocard and start using it. Mind you, the installation of the nVidia driver requires the kernelsources installed and you'd have to do this from the cli.

That's OK! Should I get the nVidia driver from the Debian repositories or from the nVidia website? To install the kernelsources do I need to recompile the kernel?

If you are using Lenny, the drivers you need may not be in the Debian repositories. Since I always recommend doing it the Debian way, that means you'll have to pull them from Sid. Look at this.

Thanks guys.
I've installed the card and the nvidia driver using the instructions from rickh's link and the display is working.
I got a few bugs reported in apt-listbugs but proceeded anyway.
According to the new xorg.conf file, the nvidia driver is being used but the device identifier has not changed from SIS as shown below:

Is this likely to affect performance and if so should I edit it and what to? The card is a nVidia GeForce 6200.

It won't affect performances, if the nvidia driver is working then the video card could be named "red pepperoni" without causing any problem. Just forget about it, or alternatively try something else after backing up the working xorg.conf.

To know if the nvidia drivers is working properly use in console :

Among the first lines of the output you should see something like :

I've just tried running the glxinfo command but get the following output:

I've tried running it as root with the same result!

# aptitude install mesa-utils

Well that all seems to be OK! Thanks again. :)