Re: nVidia drivers

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

Wulfy wrote:
> I've been trying for ages to install the drivers for my nVidia card. [1]
>
> I tried the debs in Sarge.  They wanted to install the 2.4.27 kernel.
> I'm using the 2.6.8. [2]
>
> I tried the installer from nVidia, one of the 8000 series drivers.  it
> worked!  Everything was installed.  When X started, it bombed out with
> "No screens found".  I dug around in the logs and found that the driver
> I was using didn't work for my card. I needed the legacy drivers.
>
> At this point I gave up, until today.  I went and got the 1.0.7174
> driver installer from nVidia...  it wouldn't work.  It said that the
> kernel needed to be "configured" and couldn't find the kernel source
> (it's in /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.8).  I've attached the log.
>
> What do I need to do to get this damn driver to install?  Short of
> buying a new video card.
>
> [1] nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15)
> [2] Linux Yewdales-lodge 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Tue Aug 16 13:22:48 UTC 2005 
> i686 GNU/Linux

Are you using a self-compiled kernel? If yes, then it might be enough to
create a symlink /usr/src/linux which points to the kernel-source-2.6.8
directory. (At least that was sufficient to get it working for me.)

If you are using a stock Debian kernel (and your output of "uname -a"
seems to suggest that you do), then you need to install the appropriate
kernel-headers package. (If you did not compile the kernel yourself then
the kernel source directory will not contain the information which the
nvidia installer needs.)

You could also try the Debian package for the legacy nvidia driver,
"nvidia-kernel-legacy-2.6-686".

Regards,
           Florian