I was quite surprised as I started my workstation two days ago and it doesn’t boot up as expected. After some moments I remembered that I’ve updated my Debian/SID a day before ..
After a few messages the boot process dropped me to a rescue shell telling me that the root partition can’t be found. That’s an old behaviour and was fixed in a very short time but after continue of booting the X-Server doesn’t start too. We all know it - new kernel so new nvidia-modules must be build.
I’ve installed the nvidia-glx and the nvida-kernel-source packages from debian’s non-free repository and built it as everytime with the help of the well known module-assistent and after rebuilding it I tried to start my X-server.
Oooh - nice try. The new module told me that my old GeForce4 MX 460 is not supported through the 173.08-series nvidia-driver - I’ll have to use version 96xx which can be found at nvidias-support-page.
I’ve downloaded and tried to run the ‘.run’ file from nvidia but building the driver still failed. After reading the nvidia-support-forum I’ve found the note that the driver must be patched to build along with a 2.6.25-kernel. The patch can be downloaded from here. Following the instructions in this post it was quite easy to install and get my X-server rerunning and writing this piece of text.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
su - cd /usr/src aptitude reinstall
linux-headers-2.6.25-2-486
linux-headers-2.6.25-2-common
linux-kbuild-2.6.25 wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/96.43.05/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-96.43.05-pkg2.run wget http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=30770&d=1205875938 mv attachment.php?attachmentid=30770 NVIDIA_kernel-96.43.05-2290218.diff sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.05-pkg1.run –apply-patch NVIDIA_kernel-96.43.05-2290218.diff sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.05-pkg1-custom.run