Installing NVidia's drivers on Debian

[GnuVince]

Hi everyone,

I installed Debian sarge yesterday with a kernel 2.6.7 image. Now, I don't feel like compiling my own kernel (done that for four years), so is there any way to install the drivers even if I just have a binary kernel install?

[GnuVince]

I found more info, someone said to link linux to kernel-headers-`uname -r`, so I did and I got farther in the install, however, it exited with the following message:

-> Kernel module compilation complete.
ERROR: Unable to load the kernel module 'nvidia.ko'. This is most likely
because the kernel module was built using the wrong kernel source files.
Please make sure you have installed the kernel source files for your
kernel; on Red Hat Linux systems, for example, be sure you have the
'kernel-source' rpm installed. If you know the correct kernel source
files are installed, you may specify the kernel source path with the
'--kernel-source-path' commandline option.
-> Kernel module load error: insmod: error inserting './usr/src/nv/nvidia.ko':
-1 Invalid module format
ERROR: Installation has failed. Please see the file
'/var/log/nvidia-installer.log' for details. You may find suggestions
on fixing installation problems in the README available on the Linux
driver download page at www.nvidia.com.

Can anyone help me?

[Ingy]

Well, currently there are only pre-built modules for 2.4-series kernels in the sarge (and sid, now I've checked), but the maintainer, Randall Donald, has his own repositories which you will find links to on his Debian/NVIDIA packaging homepage. I believe there are modules for 2.6.7 there. Alternatively you could just install the kernel headers for your kernel and build the modules yourself. If you choose to do that, then the docs for nvidia-kernel-source cover it pretty clearly.

EDIT: Poster posted a followup before I posted this, though I think this is still useful.

[zander]

-> Kernel module load error: insmod: error inserting './usr/src/nv/nvidia.ko': -1 Invalid module format

Whenever you receive this error message, please check the output of dmesg for additional information.