The debian answer is a linking method that allows mesa to live on and for the nvidia driver to have everything it's own way. In theory and practice I've found it to be a very good solution with two big draw backs: the mess created by either system makes it a night mare to remove one in place of the other and it takes them a good while to update to each new release of the driver due to the testing required. Some people choose to use the package; others don't... Install instructions are available on the debian wiki.
Also I've had a number of odd problems with directx and wine over the last two weeks. Including a very strange one where the second time I run the application it's speed is slower than an ant in the range of 0.7fps instead of the normal 10fps - furthermore it's ability to grab data seems to also be slowed. This is all while using the same resources that the application does at full speed. I'm forced to restart my xserver every time I wish to play it (which is twice a day) and if I don't I can kill X or even lock up my system. Though I've been unable to work out the cause beyond 'it's probably some thing to do with the nvidia driver'. If some one could offer a some debugging advice on what I should be looking for it'd be very nice.
System is Debian sid 6600gt (have tested with the last three drivers) amd 2400+
On 1/10/07, Kuba Ober kuba@mareimbrium.org wrote:
My system is: Athlon XP 2700 NVIDIA GPU GeForce4 Ti 4200 (with NVIDIA driver version 1.0-9631) Debian Etch
Last system modification was an update of the debian system with the availabe patches on 05.01.2007. This is most probably the root of the problem.
Isn't there a "sister" package repository somewhere that would have the NVidia drivers that install in a package-controlled way, and update automatically with the rest of stuff?
Livna provides that for RedHat/Fedora distros and it solved it for me (not having to reinstall drivers after every update).
Cheers, KUba