Re: Confused: nvidia on AMD64???
On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 02:07:32PM -0600, Michael Langley wrote:
> I don't know about the rest of the list but there are some things I don't like to depend on my distro for. Kernel source, alsa, and nvidia drivers just to name a few. I just updated the latest nvidia drivers the other day and got them from nvidia.com at the url below:
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
>
> They work just fine.
Unfortunately the nvidia installer assumes you run redhat or similar and
makes a lovely mess of the filesystem. It is highly discouraged to do
something so windows like to your debian system.
Windows is quite unstable in many cases, and it is often _not_ directly
microsoft's fault, although encouraging everyone to write their own
installers and putting files everywhere is their fault. We try to
encourage the saner approach in debian. This means anything in /usr
(except /usr/local), /bin, /sbin, /lib, belongs to dpkg/apt and nothing
else has any business putting files there. If they do, dpkg is allowed
and expected to overwrite the files at will.
The debian packages for the nvidia driver puts things in the right
place, uses dpkg so the files won't be overwritten by other things and
won't overwrite existing files, and it just works and is easy to manage.
Certainly easier to installing it from the nvidia package.
If you want your system slightly broken, that is your choice. Please
don't encourage others to repeat it though.
Len Sorensen
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