Hey all. Try as I might, I can't get proprietary Nvidia drivers working on the lightweight Debian netinstall.

I'm looking for a similar distro that I can build up myself, but with proprietary graphics drivers preloaded.

Any suggestions?

Cheers in advance

I'm not aware of anyone requested. I currently use Crunchbang, a lightweght Openbox-based Debian derivative, on my netbook. Yet it definitely doesn't have the proprietary nvidia drivers pre-installed as I had to install it myself. For me it was just a matter of typing in apt-get install and nvidia-xconfig commands. That's what I like about Debian.

I suggest you to try to figure out what went wrong with your current installation and not to waste time on reinstalling the same system over and over again. What was the way you installed the drivers and at what stage did it fail? IMHO better to use packages from the debian team for that, not the binary installer provided by nvidia.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi,
I recommend using either CentOS or CrunchBang. CentOS is very similar to Debian in many ways, in both looks and how it works. I use it and like it, even though some people think it's better for servers. As for CrunchBang, it is based off of Debian itself, extremely lightweight and fast and I can also recommend it.
Both these distributions should support the drivers you are needing.

Thanks guys. I've had suggestions of Crunchbang before I began using Debian so I'll give it a whirl and return if I encounter any problems.

Much appreciated

You might wanna try Arch as well. Nvidia is not preinstalled there but it's very easy to install it from official repos and everything works great. Plus the distro itself is very lightweight to the point where after fresh installation you have nothing. So you build a system by yourself just as you want it except Arch doesn't have USE flags like Gentoo so you'll have to deal with default dependencies. One more great thing is you get all latest versions of packages (the most recent drivers).

Well, for now Crunchbang is pure Debian (unlike Ubuntu that is pretty different distro now). So any information about Debian will be 100 % applicable to Crunchbang as well. You can even get a Crunchbang out of your Debian netinstall installation though much simpler will be just to install Crunchbang.