Upcoming Debian 7 - Have they addressed and fixed the following?

I left Debian 6 about a year ago because of problems with the following:

#1) No easy way to install the binary nVidia driver over Noveau.

#2 The text installer didn't work correctly.

Has these two things been addressed in D7? I know distros like 'OpenSuse 12.1' (which I currently use) has a simple way to get rid of Noveau, and install the latest nvidia video driver easy. (via Yast)

The 2nd - installers. I hate graphical installers especially because 90% of the time they don't work. (I tried 5 current distros, they all failed at one point or another. But OpenSUSE12s worked why I'm on this.) Text installers - at least with Debian worked all the time, but it did things I cannot fool with. Like wanting to download 600+ megs of stuff even if I'm installing via a DVD. With my extremely slow connection, 600 megs would me a 6+ hour long install, and at times I have to reinstall it again several times to make it work right.

So is there a new installer for D7? I seemed to have heard that. But does it work practically? I know, I'll have to wait for Debian 7.01 but Debian has been worth the wait, especially if these two problems are fixed once and for all.

Before installing the nVIdia proprietary driver, you need to blacklist the nouveau driver. This has not changed, although the latest nVidia drivers now support DKMS, so changing / upgrading the kernel no longer requires re-installation of the driver. Look at /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (I assume that Debian distributions have that) and add the line "blacklist nouveau", then reboot into text mode, install the nVidia driver, and reboot again. You should be golden then. DO NOT install the nVidia drivers in Synaptic/Aptitude, but download and install the driver directly from nVidia. I've always had problems with the distribution packaged ones, but never with the ones directly downloaded from nVidia.

ditto Rubberman. I was able to use nvidia-glx-legacy, until i deleted dual boot and went full Debian. After that I had to use the package from Nvidia. Here are my notes:

(NVIDIA OPTION)

After rebuilding system with Debian as the only OS I was unable to fully access NVIDIA. Instead I down loaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.20-pkg1.run (based on Nvidia info for my card/chipset) from the Nvidia website.

Had to boot in single user mode to ./ the package after (chmod 750).

Package called for gcc 4.3 / gcc4.4 was installed. gcc 4.3 is available in Lenny. Changed sources.list to Lenny only and installed “gcc”, and “make” from there.

Package ran fine, Nvidia splash screen is back, auto installed nvidia-settings and configured X. (however /etc/x11/org.conf was left in place?)

(ps)

in prior attempts I had manually created /etc/X11/xorg.conf using vi editor (or your preferred editor).

*** create /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section “Device”
Identifier “Device0” (originally - “MyGpu”)
Driver “nvidia”
Option “DynamicTwinView” “true”
EndSection

I always found that the Nvidia drivers installed fine on Debian when using DKMS or the direct download. The method here in the wiki has been reliable.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by elija

I always found that the Nvidia drivers installed fine on Debian when using DKMS or the direct download. The method here in the wiki has been reliable.

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Yes. The latest drivers from nVidia are now supporting DKMS out of the box so you won't need to reinstall the driver when the kernel changes. I'd been nagging them for a long time about that. Don't know if they listened to me, or just got tired of reinstalling the drivers as much as the rest of us were! :-)