[Sussex] Debian and the nvidia driver!

[Steven Dobson]

John

On Sat, 2006-08-19 at 18:50 +0100, John D. wrote:
> On Friday 18 August 2006 22:45, Steven Dobson wrote:
> > Can you provide a URL to the nVidia driver that you've got?  I would
> > like to see what the package is dependant on.
> 
> I'm presuming that you meant this:- http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html and 
> it's the IA32 version 8762.

That'll do.  Gave me what I was looking for.

> > nVidia (and ATI and Matrox) don't provide open source drivers so they
> > have to be built for the appropate kernel.  If you have a package then
> > someone has done the work, but it may not yet be built for the kernel
> > you've installed.
> 
> No no, it's normally just a case that if there isn't a pre-built module for 
> the kernel version, you just have to download the driver version you want, 
> the "kernel-sources" file (which I understand is the same 
> as "kernel-headers") and then do 
> 
> init 3
> 
> su to root
> 
> followed by "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run"
> 
> it then does it's usual i.e. you have to accept the T's & C's, it checks for 
> prebuilt module, if nothing found, you hit OK, then it asks you a couple of 
> Yes/No questions and builds the module and installs it for you - then only 
> thing then is to change the driver name in the Xorg.conf from "nv" 
> to "nvidia" and then restart the X server.

Okay, if you read the "KERNEL INTERFACES" section of the README it will
compile some code, but this is just a thin wrapper around a binary
module.  It also says that you will have the GCC compiler installed and
the linker.  You probably do have them from the errors I'm seeing, but
just lest make sure.

   # apt-get install gcc binutils

> Problem is, is that it's erroring me out at the module build, with the error 
> that says
> 
> [quote]'/lib/modules/2.6.17-2-686/build/include/linux/kernel.h is missing and 
> that I need to make sure that the kernel-sources package is installed and 
> correctly configured. [/quote]

Try doing an install of the linux kernel headers for your kernel
(2.6.17-2):

    # apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.17-2-686


> Plus that the kernel source path to '/lib/modules/2.6.17-2-686/build is 
> incorrect.

I think that the install of the linux-headers above will have fixed
that.


> This has stumped me, because previously, I've just had to install the 
> kernel-sources and the driver will compile/build fine.

But did you installed the kernel sources for the same version of the
kernel that you're running?

Steve

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