I am using debian unstable distribution with a 2.4.24 kernel (hand rolled), with a last update on 5th March. I have tried both the 4496 and the 5336 version of the NVidia drivers and both have issues with loading the OpenGL (libGL) drivers with XFree v4.3.x.
I therefore uninstalled the NVidia stuff completely and went back to the good old debian packages of the installer. The packages I installed were:
nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-2.4.24-1-k7-smp nvidia-kernel-sourceThe great thing about the debian installer is that it checks whether you should be using TLS libraries and configures the install for you. I believe this is the main cause of the problem when using the NVidia installer. It is stated in the debian installer that the TLS libraries work differently for 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel versions.
Once the debian nvidia packages were installed and I compiled a module image for the nvidia modules, everything worked just fine. If you have never compiled a module image before, details are in the /usr/share/doc/nvidia-kernel-source/README.Debian document.
On a performance not, glxgears is now running slightly faster with the 5336 driver (2000+ FPS) over the 4496 driver (1800+ FPS). I have a XFX GeForce FX 5200 AGP8x 256 graphics card.
I recently upgraded a couple machines running unstable, which I guess picked up X 4.3.0. Now, neither can do hardware 3D rendering. (Yes, they could before the upgrade.) One has an old 3dfx using DRI, one a new Nvidia using ... whatever Nvidia uses. I noticed a migration from xlibmesa3 to xlibmesa. Did I just pick the wrong packages ? Is there a package I'm missing ? I did have to add xlibmesa-dri myself. Or is there some silly comfiguration change I have to make ? Is anyone else seeing this ? I'm getting libGL.so from xlibmesa-gl. Thanks for any insight, krb