I have a question before I do this. I'm running squeeze and I built the existing nvidia driver with module assistant from the sources from the unstable repo. However, I've used sgfxi before and would like to use it to update to the very latest nvidia driver and to make life easier when compiling custom kernels. What I wondered was whether I need to manually uninstall all of the existing nvidia stuff before running the script: e.g.

apt-get remove nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-dev nvidia-kernel-source nvidia-settings nvidia-xconfig nvidia-kernel-2.6.32-5-686

or does sgfxi do all this automatically
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hi

smxi or its cousin will not delete stuff you have manually downloaded.

But its not required to be deleted, before running the video driver setup, as smxi will build a new kernel module.

smxi does have options to delete old kernels, old modules, its downloaded stuff and its backed up stuff.

IMHO if you prefer to keep it tidy you will need to do it manually.
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sgfxi always cleans up all detected fglrx, nvidia, distro packages/direct installed, before it installs a new driver, that was a core design notion, that is, you can swap from ati to nvidia, from distro driver to direct run package install driver, all day long, to your heart's content.

Well, ok, hopefully you have better things to do with your time that that, but you can do it if you want.

So the answer is: anything in sgfxi that requires any further action for default driver installs than typing : sgfxi
is a bug, and should be reported. Like, if it missed a package it needs to remove, that's a bug, or if, for distro package install, it misses a package it needs to install for the driver to work, that's a bug.

If something needs to be updated manually to make it work after, that's a bug. and so on, for straight Debian systems that is. Systems that diverge a bit from standard debian, like Mepis, may now and then require some extra step, but that's not related to sgfxi or debian.
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Thanks both for the advice. I removed all the old stuff manually before I saw the last post and then ran the script. Everything installed perfectly. Excellent script!!
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oh, you should also be able to swap from nouveau to non free nvidia as well, though that's harder and requires reboots and things.

The notion behind sgfxi is to get rid of that somewhat absurd amount of method/knowledge you will see in forum threads after forum threads about how to successfully install some video driver, and replace it all with sgfxi as the single command one needs. I certainly can't remember anything more than that, heh.
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Me neither. I just want to use my desktop, not spend hours figuring out how to configure it properly. Tools like this make life so much easier
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