Installing Nvidia on Debian 3.1 "Sarge"

[philip <philip@radford-online.co.uk>]

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Hi all,

I have recently been introduced to Debian having come from a Red Hat 9.0 background so certain things are different to what I am experienced with.

My debian install will be primarily for playing around especially with the GUI interfaces of Gnome and KDE.

I have a few issues that I can not find the answer to by googling or otherwise :-

1. My system currently boots straight into GDM rather than a standard console login prompt which I would prefer as a system admin. I will then manually launch XFree86 with 'startx'. How do I go about making this change. I have not bothered with GUIs up until now and do everything via SSH and the command prompt.

2. During the debian install it prompted me to specifiy my graphics card so I seleted 'nv'. However I have now looked at nvidia and they do their own driver which has I presume is better for my needs in terms of OpenGL support etc. Can I install this on Debian without messing up other files/settings. I can not install it at the moment until I disable GDM as Xfree86 is always running and the installer keeps saying exit X before installing the driver.

Thanks in advance for any comments or replies.
I have only just joined the list and hope to repay everyone with my own answers to problems.

Regards
Phil.