I have an nVidia card. What distro do I want?

[mh47g]

I just installed Debian because it's what we have at school, and its giving me all kinds of issues.

What distro is most nVidia friendly?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Every distribution will provide the same basic open-source nvidia display driver shipped with xorg. Sometimes what happens is that the basic driver screws up on certain hardware (especially with newer hardware) because open-source programmers aren't provided with enough information to produce a stable and functional driver. Nvidia is not entirely open-source friendly. They eventually released open-source drivers for their motherboard hardware (onboard ethernet, onboard sound, etc) so that gives us hope that they will continue to provide open-source community with information to program stable graphics card drivers (especially now with ATi open-sourcing their graphics driver!).

Can you actually boot into the desktop environment or are you having problems before that?

 

[mh47g]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Every distribution will provide the same basic open-source nvidia display driver shipped with xorg. Sometimes what happens is that the basic driver screws up on certain hardware (especially with newer hardware) because open-source programmers aren't provided with enough information to produce a stable and functional driver. Nvidia is not entirely open-source friendly. They eventually released open-source drivers for their motherboard hardware (onboard ethernet, onboard sound, etc) so that gives us hope that they will continue to provide open-source community with information to program stable graphics card drivers (especially now with ATi open-sourcing their graphics driver!).

Can you actually boot into the desktop environment or are you having problems before that?

I am getting an error, something along the lines of "X not being able to detect any screens". I have an 8800GT if that helps.

 

[WildHorse]

(A)
The 169.12 linux driver is available on nvidia's site.

(B)
http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Ok so at least it doesn't give you garbled graphics. If you hit Alt+F2 then it should ask you to login to gain terminal access. We're going to have to edit our xorg.conf file to swap our display driver to a more basic driver. I think Debian should have the nano command line editor. If so you should be able to type the following:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Once inside the text file scroll down until you see 'Section "Device"' . Under that you should find it say

Driver "nv"

Delete nv and type vesa (make sure there are still quotation marks there). Hit Ctrl+X to exit nano. It'll ask you to save. Hit y and then hit enter. Then just reboot the computer and it should be working.

The next step will be to install the proprietary nvidia display driver. It will give you 3D support if you choose to play any linux games. I would've just given you instructions to install the proprietary driver inside the terminal while you're there, but new users tend to be more comfortable under a desktop environment before they do anything else. Plus Debian has a very unnoob friendly way to install the nvidia driver.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: scott
(A)
The 169.12 linux driver is available on nvidia's site.

(B)
http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA

The B option won't help him out too much. OpenSUSE makes it much easier to install the nvidia driver than Debian and uses different instructions for compiling it manually. He'll have to go with option A or do it through Debian's repositories.

(Imho, I think you should've tried either Ubuntu or OpenSUSE if you're new to linux. Debian is great, but other distributions have made it much easier to do these tasks)

 

[SleepWalkerX]

The easiest way to install the nvidia driver with Debian is apparently through module-assistant. Here's the link to Debian's wiki.

There's a lot of info to sift through so let me copy and paste you some directions.

Your repositories should be set up to access the non-free nvidia packages so this shouldn't be a problem. Open up the terminal and login as root.

sudo su

Now we're going to install some source code and compile a kernel module. Copy and paste the following commands once you're root.

apt-get install module-assistant gcc nvidia-kernel-common

m-a update

m-a prepare

m-a auto-install nvidia

apt-get install nvidia-glx

Now we need to tell xorg to use the nvidia driver instead of any other driver. While you're root type

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down until you see 'Section "Device"' . Right under that you'll find it say

Driver "xxxx"

where xxxx would either say vesa, nv, or whatever. Replace xxxx with nvidia (again, keep the parenthesis). Now hit Ctrl+X and if it asks you to save hit y and then enter. Now just reboot and you should be good to go (you can do this by typing the "reboot" command while being root). If you want you can do all this while you're in the terminal in my first post. That way you can do everything in one step and be done with it.

 

[hooflung]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpo...=4620212&postcount=399

That is how I got Ubuntu x64 working with the Official Nvidia drivers. On a plain vanilla install you cannot get them to work correctly. It is a known issue since 6.04. Most people use Envy but I think that is stupid. I spent all my free time last weekend getting those drivers to work right and MY GOD is Compiz fantastic on my 8800GS. Also, the nv drivers that come with ubuntu will not work with new models not in their database without major struggle.

My way works 100% of the time from a fresh install of Ubuntu. I have EVE and Cedega working 100% on my x64 distro. Loving it. I am 5 times more productive as a developer and desktop user than I was on this machine in Vista 64 Ultimate.

 

[mh47g]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
The easiest way to install the nvidia driver with Debian is apparently through module-assistant. Here's the link to Debian's wiki.

There's a lot of info to sift through so let me copy and paste you some directions.

Your repositories should be set up to access the non-free nvidia packages so this shouldn't be a problem. Open up the terminal and login as root.

sudo su

Now we're going to install some source code and compile a kernel module. Copy and paste the following commands once you're root.

apt-get install module-assistant gcc nvidia-kernel-common

m-a update

m-a prepare

m-a auto-install nvidia

apt-get install nvidia-glx

Now we need to tell xorg to use the nvidia driver instead of any other driver. While you're root type

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down until you see 'Section "Device"' . Right under that you'll find it say

Driver "xxxx"

where xxxx would either say vesa, nv, or whatever. Replace xxxx with nvidia (again, keep the parenthesis). Now hit Ctrl+X and if it asks you to save hit y and then enter. Now just reboot and you should be good to go (you can do this by typing the "reboot" command while being root). If you want you can do all this while you're in the terminal in my first post. That way you can do everything in one step and be done with it.

Thank you so much sleep walker, I will do this when I get home later today.