Re: compiling module nvidia

[Simon Guerrero <simon@incarnis.com>]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> Mine is: http://www.tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/debian/
>
> Short and to the point and doens't involve recompiling a kernel.
>  

Mine's even shorter and to the point! ;-)

Actually, I cheated. I stole bits of Len's howto (which is great - 
thanks), and put a few extras in. I found that most of my problems were 
a combination of not having the right apt-sources and having critical 
packages under /usr/src missing. This meant that some symbolic links 
were failing and causing the makefiles to fail.

Note that this howto assumes that the kernel version is 
2.6.8-11-amd64-generic, and that you haven't got a custom kernel. This 
is the current version AFAIK. Obviously, just swap all occurrences of 
this version string with whatever your uname -r gives you.

Corrections/additions welcome.

Simon


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Debian amd64 nvidia howto
===================

Make sure the following are in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://amd64.debian.net/debian-amd64 stable main non-free contrib
deb http://amd64.debian.net/debian-amd64 unstable main non-free contrib

Make sure you've got all the kernel sources - all these are needed as 
they have symbolic links in them.

$ apt-get install kernel-kbuild-2.6-3 
kernel-headers-2.6.8-11-amd64-generic kernel-headers-2.6.8-11 
nvidia-kernel-source nvidia-kernel-common

Get the module assistant:

$ apt-get module-assistant

Set up the appropriate kernel sources ready for the module assistant:

$ m-a -i prepare

Build the kernel module:

$ m-a a-i -i -t -f nvidia-kernel

Now get the other packages needed for getting the nvidia drivers working:

$ apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-dev

If you haven't got xfree86 installed, install it:

$ apt-get install xserver-xfree86

Otherwise, reconfigure it:

$ dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

Select 'nvidia' for the driver when prompted. Enter whatever you want 
for the card name, and just press 'return' for the Bus Identifier and 
for amount of RAM.

All other options depend on what you want. Best bet is to select 
'simple' for the monitor configuration!