Running Bookworm, Plasma DE if that’s relevant.

Background: I’m learning here. Decent amount of coding and embedded hardware experience but I’m usually missing one or two key concepts with this stuff.

Getting a box running, and wrestling with NVIDIA drivers. I successfully installed the driver (I think), but now lightdm isn’t working. From what I read it appears there’s a common issue around a race condition where lightdm tries to fire up before the drivers ready, so I need to add the nvidia driver to initramfs.

Can anyone give me some pointers? Specifically while I get the above:

  1. I’m not sure what modules need to be added and if they’re named something specific for debian vs other distros
  2. The correct file to modify
  3. The correct format/syntax that needs to be added

I’ve found lots of examples, just none specific to debian, and screwing around at this level I don’t want to bork something enough I need to do a bare install.

Thanks for any help!

  • @targetx
    1•11 months ago

    It would be useful to get some more info.

    1. how did you install the drivers?

    2. what do you mean by lightdm doesn’t work?

    3. can you get some logs from a terminal? Like journalctl -xe? If your gui isnt coming up you could get these from tty1 by using ctrl+alt+f1.

    I haven’t used nvidia in a long time but use debian daily. I’d expect if you installed the drivers using a supported method it would do stuff like initramfs etc automatically if required.

    I’m sure you already found this but just in case here is the official documentation; https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers