[HOW TO] [LINUX/DEBIAN] enable 3D rendering Nvidia Cards

[computathug]

Ok so I have done this tutorial mainly for Lenny users as it has taken me best part of a day to get this working and your system needs this for 3D games and Compiz to run.

K now i have started with a fresh install and have only installed the basic start up files and the XFCE Desktop. First of all the sources.list need include "contrib non-free" if the aren't already. Now open a shell as root user and follow these commands.

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update-pciids
apt-get install module-assistant nvidia-kernel-source
m-a prepare
m-a a-i nvidia
apt-get install nvidia-glx
depmod -a
modprobe nvidia

# This is only necessary if you start to use nvidia for the first time:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

now we check the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and search for the section "Module" and check for

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Load "glx"

and make sure it is present. Now check that there is no reference to "dri" or "GLCore" and if there are comment them out with "#" before saving.

In the "Device" section for your video card, change the driver (normally nv or vesa) to nvidia. If the driver is not defined, add the line

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Driver "nvidia"

Now log out and log back onto your system and sart another shell as root and type

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glxinfo|grep rendering 

If you see

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bash: glxinfo: command not found

then we need to install the mesa-utils package which we can do with apt

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apt-get install mesa-utils

Now if we try

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glxinfo|grep rendering

we should see

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glxinfo|grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes

I hope this saves people the amount of time it took me :XD