Could you review the NvidiaGraphicsDrivers wiki page?

[Russ Allbery]

Christian Kastner <debian at kvr.at> writes:

> there's been a flurry of activity recently on the wiki page:

>      http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

> There seems to be much disagreement on which of the many installation
> methods should be the recommended one (see history). It would be greatly
> appreciated if you could share your insight in the matter (and perhaps
> do a general QA check on the page -- the NVIDIA drivers packaging
> improved substantially in the past year, and I fear not all of it is
> reflected in the page).

Well, I think DKMS is the right default and the thing to recommend, which
is why I edited the page originally and made those changes after someone
(outside of Debian) pointed me at that page while explaining how confusing
and complicated the NVIDIA package installation process is.

It looks like the subsequent changes have preserved the basic intent of
that change, so while I would phrase the page differently than what it
currently looks like, the basic initial intent of my edit is still there,
so I'm happy.  It still lists module-assistant first, but the DKMS section
says that it's the easiest, and the module-assistant section isn't
horribly long, so that seems like a reasonable compromise.

I do think the page is way too long and a lot of the details are only of
interest to a tiny minority of users.  The average user really doesn't
need more than:

1. Try nouveau.  If that works and is fast enough for you, you're done.
2. If nouveau doesn't work, install nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-dkms and
   create an xorg.conf configuration file containing Driver "nvidia".
3. If your card isn't supported by that version, look at the *-legacy*
   packages instead.

But if someone wants to maintain all that additional documentation, I'm
not going to stand in their way; I certainly don't have time to do so!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>