[Solved]NVIDIA 970 card too new; what do I do?

[Leng88]

I'm attempting to get 7.7 to work properly on my new box. One of the issues is that I ordered a last-gen card, but when it was out-of-stock, the builders kindly swapped in a brand new GTX 970 at no cost. That was nice, but Nouveau does not understand it and when I tried the proprietary driver (per the Nvidia page on the Debian wiki), I found that they do not support the 970, nor does the supposedly newer driver in backport. So I'm stuck in fallback mode with Gnome 3... and no Blender

So, my question is... is it smart to just wait until the Debian repo's have an updated driver that supports the card? Or is it worth it to try to install the driver package available from the Nvidia website? (I've never attempted such a thing, so expect me to come screaming back for help on such a thing )

Thanks.

[milomak]

The driver you need is currently in experimental

Code: Select all

  Version table:
     343.22-2 0
        650 http://debian.mirror.ac.za/debian/ experimental/non-free amd64 Packages
        650 http://free.hands.com/debian/ experimental/non-free amd64 Packages

you could enable and then simulate a run to see what packages it would want to pull in. although i am a proponent of deb solutions, in this instance i think trying the nvidia driver may actually be safer as you can just uninstall it without the risk of other files being pulled in.

[Leng88]

Thanks. I'm certainly willing to try installing the Nvidia driver, but my knowledge of that extends no further than invoking that .run file. And certainly doesn't extend to uninstalling, if necessary.

Is there a handy guide to the whole thing somewhere that you could point me to?

[sjukfan]

Did you click some weird local Nvidia site?

From Nvidia's site.
32-bit http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverRe ... 7843/en-us
64-bit http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverRe ... 7844/en-us

[Leng88]

Ah... I had seen the info on that page and it was pretty sparse. But I had skipped over the link to the README pages. Which turn out to be reassuringly extensive.

That should provide me with what I need. If not I'll come screaming back. Thanks!

[Leng88]

I know you're all waiting on pins & needles, so I can happily report that it is all working now with the proprietary drivers on 7.7 64-bit.
I needed a little help from the System Config forum, but once I got all the supporting libraries loaded in it all went smoothly enough.
Thanks!