Hi,
Our local school has been 100% GNU/Linux since 2010. Since that date,
servers and desktops have run pretty much everything from Slackware to
CentOS to SUSE and (currently) Rocky Linux.
I'm increasingly frustrated with RHEL clones as well as SUSE, so I
thought I'd take a fresh look at Debian, which I've been using back then
from Potato to Squeeze, if I remember correctly.
I'm currently in the honeymoon phase with Debian Trixie, which runs in a
couple VMs as well as on a spare sandbox PC in my office. I'm pleasantly
surprised. The old NCurses installer is still the same, and expert mode
is light-years away from the current nonsense cultivated by other
distributions (no names). Anyway.
The only problem I'm facing right now is that most of the machines are
legacy hardware with an NVidia GeForce GT710 video card. This card runs
perfectly with the (now obsolete) NVidia 470.xx proprietary driver. I've
tried this setup on Rocky Linux 8.x and 9.x and also on OpenSUSE
Tumbleweed, and it works fine everywhere.
I gave it a spin with Debian, and the driver isn't available in the
repositories. Which is understandable, since it isn't developed anymore.
Unfortunately the performance of the free nouveau driver on these
machines is not so good, both with Wayland and X11. There's some random
glitches here and there, and the overall experience is poor.
I tried to install the driver manually like we used to do it two decades
ago. Downloaded the installer from nvidia.com, installed the build
dependencies and the kernel headers, blacklisted the nouveau modules and
switched to multi-user.target.
The build process looks promising at first, but after about 30 seconds
and 1.5 MB of build logs, I get this:
---8<--- /var/log/nvidia-installer.log ------
...
make[4]: ***
[/usr/src/linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-common/scripts/Makefile.build:234:
/tmp/selfgz777/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02/kernel/nvidia/i2c_nvswitch.o]
Error 1
make[4]: Target '/tmp/selfgz777/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02/kernel/'
not remade because of errors.
make[3]: *** [/usr/src/linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-common/Makefile:1970:
/tmp/selfgz777/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02/kernel] Error 2
make[3]: Target 'modules' not remade because of errors.
make[2]: *** [/usr/src/linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-common/Makefile:236:
__sub-make] Error 2
make[2]: Target 'modules' not remade because of errors.
make[2]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-amd64'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:236: __sub-make] Error 2
make[1]: Target 'modules' not remade because of errors.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-6.12.57+deb13-common'
make: *** [Makefile:80: modules] Error 2
ERROR: The nvidia kernel module was not created.
ERROR: Installation has failed.
---8<----------------------------------------
So I thought I'd ask for your advice here. Anyone managed to build this
driver successfully, maybe with a helpful patch somewhere ?
Cheers from the rainy South of France,
Niki
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