After much procrastination I finally installed my Nvidia (opens new window) graphics card and got it working under X Windows (opens new window), KDE (opens new window) 3.3 and Debian (opens new window) (unstable). An invaluable reference in my trials was a Debian Kernel Compile HowTo (opens new window) which as the title suggests also provides instructions on how to upgrade your kernel to 2.6. Further on in the howto it addresses how to get a Nvidia graphics card working as well. A big thank you to the anonymous author of this howto! Another page I found which looks helpful (though I haven’t read it indepth) is this one (opens new window). Further, a caveat for newbies (like me 😉 is mentioned here (opens new window). The long-and-the-short of it is that if you want to use dpkg-reconfigure (which provides easy wizard style configuring of your Debian system) then never edit your configuration files manually. An interesting quote I found the other day, which I think aptly describes the struggles that many linux users have said this: “One of the great things about Linux is that you really get to educate yourself as a user .. you will not only have the satisfaction of a custom built system but also gain the insight to how the system works.” (From Linux Times (opens new window))

P.S. I now also have a working scroll mouse! Simple pleasures 😉