I recompiled my kernel so I had alsa as modules instead of built-in. The problem is the kernel compilation breaks the nvidia driver and later the installation. Because I reinstalled debian because of this yesterday already I don't feel like doing that again.

I did the compilation and now modprobe can't find the driver anymore. The nvidia installation program recognised the installed driver and removes it. Now I install the driver again, after building the kernel module I get an error that I built the nvidia module against the wrong kernel sources. I have my kernel source untarred in /usr/src/linux so I gave it with the --kernel-source-path but it still gives me the same error. Why can't it compile against the source I used to install the kernel now? When I compiled a new kernel once (without the driver installed) it worked fine and now I try to compile a new kernel and the driver and the installation break. This is how I build my kernels:

make clean /mrproper (tried both)
make menuconfig (only with make mrproper above)
make && make modules
make modules_install
make install

Could the problem be that with the first compilation a linux.old and linux is made (in lilo and in /boot it has some similar files of which I can't get the names now but vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old are there as well for example) and that it can't make this again if I compile a new kernel? Would it have a problem removing the linux.old changing linux to linux.old and then create the new linux in this folder for example?

I can't give logs cause I can't get it on this computer.

Thanks for any help you have on this topic !

try installing the kernel and nvidia module the 'debian way' - have a look at google...

As Iread in the long doc from nVidia, you have to recompile the driver if you update / recompile the kernel.

Yep the problem is that it won't build the new driver. I'll try the debian way drigz but it hasn't worked for me so far (tried like a hundred times with different tutorials but it always gave errors with the make-kpkg but I;ll take a look again) so I hope it'll go this time.

Well i just installed debian and recompiled a kernel by following directions from the debian site (i got sarge). but then i got sick of debian after spending about 20 mins trying to get make xconfig to work.

Now I think of it that would be like what I thought that the make install way doesn't properly replace the images after more compilations. That might explain why I couldn't compile kernel 2.6.8.1 which if I compiled always was 2.6.7 with a lot of errors. Maybe I'd better delete all the .old kernel files cause I can't look things up easily now on that computer.

make menuconfig is a lot easier. I never got make xconfig to work even when I have a complete x system installed. make menuconfig only needs a few files, cpp, gcc, binutils, libc6-dev libncurses5-dev and make IIRC. I think if you need something else it's a dependency of those files

But make xconfig is so much better - and it worked on slackware immediately after installing the qt package. I'm gonna try gentoo next for a distro with easy package management...

I thought make xconfig only looked a bit better. I have made the partitions for extra distributions and gentoo will be the first I try after I have everything in debian completely configured as I want. In fact I'd already have gentoo if I wasn't such a newbie when I chose the distribution. LOL I didn't know that I could use I386 on my PC and searched for I686 which I couldn't find very easy so I picked up my downloaded debian CD again.

I've fixed the error. Might be an error in my own memory, since I thought I always had ignored the gcc check failure. So I went into 'delete everything till it works' mode just ago and deleted cpp and reinstalled that in version 2.95 and it worked. I think deleting gcc would be better since there are no dependencies which have to be deleted as well. Deleting old kernel files in /boot and deleting all files in /boot and then installing the kernel on the clean /boot didn't work either BTW

Here's how to compile the kernel + install the nvidia drivers using the Debian way: http://www.desktop-linux.net/debkernel.htm