Upon a fresh install of X, Debian defaults to the open source NV driver for nVidia graphics cards. Since I  used Kenshi Muto’s custom Lenny install iso I had the latest 2.6.30 kernel by default and had to do some tweaking to get the preparatory nVidia driver to work. First I had to download the following files from Sid:

linux-headers-2.6.30-1-amd64
linux-headers-2.6.30-1-common
linux-kbuild-2.6.30

If you are not using the 2.6.30 kernal simply type this:

apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Exit Xorg. Now that you have the headers and kbuild we want to create a symlink so that your system has no problems finding them; Then install the nvidia-glx and fetch the preparatory drive with wget (remember to make it executable):

cd /usr/src
sudo ln -s linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux
cd ~/
sudo apt-get nvidi-glx
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/185.18.14/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run

Allow the install script to download the necessary files. Once that is finished reboot your system and when you next start X you should see the nVidia logo briefly, indicating it worked.

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