NVIDIA doesn’t have the best history with Linux as it’s cards historically didn’t work well with Linux. But over the past few years things were changing and at least in my experience they were at a point that the cards worked without major issues. As some of you know I use the unstable version of Debian, primarily because it has the newest versions of software available but the downside of using it is that things break and sometimes they break spectacularly.
This time there was an issue with the NVIDIA driver/configuration which caused my system to stop opening the GUI login interface when I restarted the system. I tried reinstalling the driver as the error messages in the log suggested that the issue was caused by a missing driver. I purged the nvidia drivers by issuing the following command as root:
apt purge *nvidia*
Then reinstalling the drivers using the following command:
apt-get install nvidia-detect nvidia-driver
After this reinstall the driver was being detected correctly but the GUI still wasn’t coming up. A search on the net didn’t return many useful results but on one of the sites, there was a reference to the fact that running nvidia-xconfig recreats the X Configuration file for NVIDIA cards, so I tried that by running the following commands as root
apt-get install nvidia-xconfig nvidia-xconfig
This created the Configuration file and once I rebooted everything started working again. I did have to reconfigure my desktop since one of the things I had tried was to reset all the custom configurations to KDE but that was mostly a minor issue.
This issue was on Kernel 6.12.9-amd64 with Debian Unstable release as of 17th Jan 2025
– Suramya