Can't install anything

[Redeyes1]

Hi, I'm having problems installing or removing anything from Debian. The whole problem has kind of looped for me for half a day now.

I installed Debian with the latest release and when I booted into the system, everything was working fine except the screen was blurry. So I spent a few hours looking for a way to install nvidia drivers. Trying to used the nv drivers, (vesa before) caused gdm to stop working with "no screen found" errors and when i finally installed the nvidia drivers, it seems to have reverted my kernel back. I was at 686 before and now I'm on 486, giving me an extra option between 486 and 686 in grub.

This was fine to me but when I boot into the 486 I get notifications about updates close to a gig in download size. I didn't want to download it in fear of breaking the system but did after package manager would refuse to install or uninstall anything without installing/uninstalling the gigs worth of updates.

During the update, my screen kind of malfunctioned and i rebooted going into ctrl+alt+f1. When I came to, the gdm wouldn't start, kind of looping to the login screen and blanking out, never fully drawing it. I tried a few configurations in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to no avail and decided to try the 686 configuration.

Xserver wouldn't boot with noscreens found untill I decided to try to install the same nvidia drivers. While I was still on the 686 kernel, it would not boot but when I rebooted and went into the 486 kernel, it logged back in to what seemed before updating.

And I'm right back where I started.

Sorry for the long paragraphs but I've been racking my brain googling answers.

[elija]

First question: How did you install the drivers?

The simplest (GUI) way is to open synaptic and then go to Settings -> Repositories, make sure that non-free repositories are selected in the main panel and click close.

Click the reload button on the Synaptic toolbar and when it has completed it's update, search for nvidia-glx. There should be a package by that name, so install it and it's dependencies.

When you reboot you should be running the nvidia drivers.

This has the advantage that the drivers will be installed from the Debian repositories and so it will match your kernel and be kept up to date. The disadvantage is that they may not be the latest and greatest drivers.

You should be able to do this from your 686 installation.

[Redeyes1]

When I try to install the nvidia-glx package, it says I need a certain dependency, the kernel 173.14.09, I then try to install nvidia-kernel-source. After the download, it still doesn't let me download the nvidia-glx package.

I forgot how I did downloaded the original nvidia drivers because I searched on google and tried several ways to install it.

Thanks and sorry for late reply.