Installing NVIDIA Desktop Drivers on Debian

Debian 13 (Trixie)

To install the NVIDIA Drivers on Debian 13 you may refer to the official NVIDIA Documentation for Turing Architecture GPUs or newer.

This document is reference for older GPU types such as Pascal architecture GPUs (GTX 1000 Series), which may produce problems on install, or be completely unsupported by drivers after version 580.142

Pascal Architecture

To install the drivers for the Pascal GTX1000 Series GPUs from NVIDIA you’ll need to:

  • Download the .run drivers file from NVIDIA.
  • Install some dependencies.
  • Pray to whatever god you believe in.

In this case we will use drivers 580.142, but you might need to vary the filename and driver version based on your case.

Firstly ensure your system is up to date:

# Check if there are updates
apt update

# Upgrade the packages
apt upgrade --fix-broken --fix-missing -y

# Optional Cleanups
apt autoclean
apt autoremove

  1. Enable i386 architecture.

    • dpkg --add-architecture i386

  2. Install the following dependencies via apt:

    • pkg-config
    • libglvnd-dev
    • gcc
    • make
    apt install pkg-config libglvnd-dev gcc make -y

  3. Download the desired drivers from NVIDIA (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/265443/).

  4. Change permissions for the .run file.

    • chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.142.run

  5. Execute the installation script.

    • ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.142.run

  6. When prompted on whether to disable Nouveau, select YES.

  7. When prompted on whether to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, select YES.

  8. When prompted on whether to make a backup of your Xorg configuration, select YES.

  9. Once the installation is complete, add the following parameters to your modprobe directory:

    # ~: nano /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers-dkms.conf
# Modeset Fixes
options nvidia-drm modeset=1
# Suspend fixes
options nvidia-drm fbdev=1
options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1
options nvidia NVreg_TemporaryFilePath=/var/tmp

  10. Ensure the following services are enabled:

    systemctl enable nvidia-hibernate.service
systemctl enable nvidia-persistenced.service
systemctl enable nvidia-resume.service
systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service

  11. Finally do:

    update-initramfs -u
update-grub
reboot

Hopefully, you should now reboot into a fully functional system with the latest drivers for your EoL Pascal GPU.

Sources

Last modified at Apr 2, 2026
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