On Monday 28 May 2007, Alan Pope wrote:
> Hi Damian,
>
> On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 15:30 +0100, Damian Brasher wrote:
> > Peter Salisbury wrote:
> > > I have ground to a halt trying to build the nvidia driver for
> > > the new 2.6.21 kernel. What I usually do first is go into the
> > > linux-headers directory and run
> >
> > The last time a used a Nvidia GPU there was a download, non GPL
> > granted, from Nvidia that did all the hard work for you, is this
> > an option or have things changed?
>
> There is indeed a script which builds and installs the necessary
> blob and driver for Nvidia cards. Personally I avoid using it
> because it needs reinstalling every time you update the kernel, and
> I would rather use the packaged version from my distro vendor. On
> Ubuntu there is nvidia-glx-legacy, nvidia-glx and nvidia-glx-new
> for varying vintages of cards.
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
The NVIDIA provided package doesn't build on the latest Debian kernels
because of the GPL-only restriction on paravirtualisation which is
included by default in the Debian stock kernels since 2.6.20. Options
are to rebuild a kernel without CONFIG_PARAVIRT or to do various
sneaky side-steps of the checking system (such as removing the check
and recompiling, or pretending the kernel doesn't use paravirt even
though it does) Needless to say the NVIDIA package doesn't descend to
such sneakery!
Details of how to do the sneaky thing are in my TiddlyWiki at
www.salisburys.net/PetersNotes-TW.html About the best I can say for
the method it is that it works. Debian sometimes seem to take the
freedom principles to quite comical extremes - the poor NVIDIA module
doesn't even use the paravirtualisation routines in question!
ATB, Peter
