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<p><font face="Monaco">Hi folks, <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco"> I'd like to let you know that after a
week of struggling and then an hour in IRC, I finally got
nvidia-driver 390.84 installed on a fresh installation of Debian
9 Stable. But it took a lot of coaching from folks in the Debian
IRC channel. The experience was far from seamless or smooth. For
starters, I had to install the headers for the version of the
kernel that was I have on my system. Debian Stable comes with
kernel version 4.9, but the Linux headers which were
automatically installed were for kernel version 4.16<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco">Here's what I had to do to get nvidia-driver
390.48 working on my PC:</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco">1. Fix broken apt packages (which might only
have been necessary because I originally didn't have the
non-free backports repositories in sources.list).</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco">2. Create a new Xorg config file containing
the following: 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier "My
GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection'</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco">3. Reboot to a black screen. Ctrl+Alt+F2 to
get to a terminal.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">4. Install the Linux
headers for the 4.9 kernel installed on my system.</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">5. Reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms</font></font></p>
<p><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco"><br>
</font></font></p>
<p><br>
<font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">With the exception of the
non-free backports repositories, I think a lot of my
struggling could have been avoided if nvidia-driver did the
following:</font></font></p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p align="left"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">1.
Checked to see if there were any broken packages, and if
there were any fixed them<br>
</font></font></p>
<p align="left"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">2.
Made the xorg config file </font></font><br>
<font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">containing
the following: 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier "My
GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection'</font></font></font></p>
<p align="left"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">3.
Checked to see if the the right Linux headers were
installed and if necessary, installed the correct
headers <br>
</font></font></p>
<p align="left"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">3b. If
the correct headers had to be installed, ran
dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms, and <br>
</font></font></p>
<p align="left"><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">4. Rebooted
(with the user's permission, of course) <br>
</font></font></p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Monaco"><font face="Monaco">I know I might be asking
a lot of you, but these modifications would make the
nvidia-driver installation seamless. I was nearly ready to go
back to either Ubuntu or Mac just to get this GPU working, but
I stuck with it because I prefer Debian for a variety of
reasons. Setting up a new GPU should be as simple as plugging
in the GPU, booting up, installing nvidia-driver and
rebooting. It really shouldn't take a week to get a new GPU up
and running. </font><br>
</font></p>
<p><br>
<font face="Monaco"></font></p>
<font face="Monaco"><br>
Admittedly, I feel a little dumb because I originally only added
the backports repository without also adding the non-free
backports repositories. I was panicking too much to realize that
mistake. I might talk to the folks who maintain the backports
instructions, to see if they'll add a non-free section.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Thank you for your time and (hopefully) future efforts,<br>
Josh
Blagden<br>
</font>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
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