As usual, the official Debian wiki has a great writeup on getting the Drivers installed. http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers. Do yourself a favor and read the document. It will give you the full story and not just the regurgitated short version below. I use debian because I like the packaging system. I think it works well. why add the agony of recompiling drivers whenever you update kernels and whatnot. Since X was broken, The key was to switch to a console session BEFORE logging in using GDM. As soon as the login page comes up, press CTRL+ALT+F2. This is what I had to be able to log in and use my X session:

Login as root.

I used the netinst disk and had to add the “non-free” and “contrib” repositories. to do this, edit /etc/apt/sources.list.

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Find the line line that has something like

deb http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/linux/debian/debian/ lenny main
deb-src http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/linux/debian/debian/ lenny main

add “contrib non-free” to the end of both of these lines and then do a “aptitude update”

# apt-get install module-assistant nvidia-kernel-common
# m-a auto-install nvidia-kernel${VERSION}-source
# apt-get install nvidia-glx${VERSION}

In the device section, add

Driver "nvidia"

Restart GDM (and subsequently X)

# invoke-rc.d gdm restart

Install The nvidia settings interface thingy if you want. This can also verify if the driver is actually running.

aptitude install nvidia-settings

In debian, the package doesn’t install a shortcut for some reason, so just launch it by typing “nvidia-settings” into the console.

Related posts:

1. Karmic install cannot login (gdm freezes) Nvidia
2. Install the proprietary Closed source version of Virtualbox on Debian Lenny
3. Rip and convert to MP3 files in Debian Lenny
4. Install backupexec 12.5 agent on Debian Lenny
5. Join Debian Lenny to Active Directory using Samba