Installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian based OS

Guide to installing NVIDIA GPU Drivers on Debian Based OS.

What are Drivers?

A driver is a piece of software that acts as a translation layer between the applications & OS running on your computer and the physical hardware present in the system. By default when you install Debian using one of our templates on your GPU VDS, you may notice that the GPU doesn't show up on your applications. To get Debian & your applications to detect your GPU, you'll need to install the relevant drivers for it.

Installing Drivers

1. Log in to your VPS as root via SSH

2. Detecting the GPU

In your terminal, run the following command:

lspci -nn | egrep -i "3d|display|vga"

The output should have a line with Nvidia on it with the generation of your GPU.

3. Adding non-free Repository

Open your sources.list file

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Paste the following at the end of the file depending on the version of debian that you're using

Debian 11

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main non-free

Debian 12

Debian 13

Update your package manager

apt update

4. Install the driver

First, install the nvidia-detect package to see and run it.

apt install nvidia-detect -y
nvidia-detect

At the end of the output, you should see something like this:

Note down the package name(s) it shows and install it via apt

apt install nvidia-driver

5. Reboot your VPS

Now, Reboot your VPS with the following command.

reboot

And done! You've successfully installed NVIDIA Drivers on your Debian VPS.