Since my previous post showing how to install Nvidia drivers in Debian Wheezy 64-Bit I found out that the driver in the standard Debian Wheezy repo is very dated (around 304.xx or something!). As a result I started looking at the options for a new driver.
They break down like this:
1. Download & Install the latatest Nvidia Driver from http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
2. Setup the Debian Jessie ‘Backports’ repo and get a much newer nvidia driver
Supposedly (from the light research I’ve done) option 1 is not the ‘Debian way’ and is more likely to cause system issues down the road. As I’m trying to be as much of a purist as possible, and the very latest driver in my opinion isn’t likely to make a earth shattering difference I decided to go with option 2 and this is what to do:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Then add the following to the bottom of the sources.list file
# wheezy-backports deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free
Nvidia Driver Installation
NB Accept any popups that occur during the process with the default selection.
Now install the Nvidia Kernel
sudo aptitude -t wheezy-backports -r install nvidia-kernel-$(uname -r)
Install the latest Nvidia driver from the backports repo
sudo aptitude -t wheezy-backports -r install nvidia-kernel-dkms
Install Nvidia xorg config utlity from backports
sudo aptitude -t wheezy-backports -r install nvidia-xconfig
Lastly run Nvidia Xconfig (IMPORTANT STEP DONT MISS)
sudo nvidia-xconfig
That should be it, you should now have a recent Nvidia driver installed! If you’re like me you’ll probably want to install Steam now this is a full guide for how to do that on Debian Wheezy 64-Bit.