debian and nvidia drivers

[JoeHill]

Lennart Sorensen wrote: 

> On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 11:01:19PM -0400, JoeHill wrote:
> > I got the nvidia drivers working using the installer, though I must say the
> > performance is not what I experienced before on the same machine.  
> 
> Probably means it isn't installed correctly.
> 
> > Okay, from what I read from the various howtos it looked a lot more
> > complicated. I'll definitely try the packages then, but...  
> 
> It isn't complicated, and it doesn't break on upgrades the way the
> nvidia installer's mess tends to.

I see what you mean. After the second time an update broke my nvidia install,
I relented and installed the nvidia packages. It's fairly trivial to rerun the
the nvidia installer every time, but it is not optimal and I would think risky.
 
> > Is that why I did not see them in the software installer? I have non-free
> > enabled, but didn't see any nvidia packages.  
> 
> Yeah they simply aren't in lenny yet, even though they are built for
> lenny.
> 
> If you temporarily add unstable to your sources and install just the
> nvidia packages, it should work, then you can remove unstable from the
> sources again, or you could setup apt's pinning to favour lenny and then
> leave unstable there for selective installs.

Since I switched from Lenny to Testing, the drivers were in the non-free repos
and installed without a hitch. As you mentioned before, the version is actually
very up to date, only a few minor revisions back from where the 'official'
nvidia installer is.

Thanks for your advice, I must say one reason I switched to Debian was your
many endorsements.

-- 
Joe
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