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Question Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 driver install issues on Debian

Oct 4, 2024
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I'm having trouble installing Geforce RTX 3060 drivers onto my Debian desktop computer. I followed the guide at https://linuxcapable.com/install-nvidia-drivers-on-debian/, but nvidia-detect just tells me "No NVIDIA GPU detected" (this message shows up each time the system boots too) and I'm seeing no sign of activity from the card whatsoever.
It's plugged into the power supply and connected to the PCIe slot, so that shouldn't be the issue here.

First, I enabled the contrib/nonfree repositories in sources.list and followed the "Method 2: Install Nvidia Drivers via PPA" part of the aforementioned guide. During this process, entering "lspci | grep -e VGA" into Terminal as I'm told to gets me this:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation IvyBridge GT2 [HD Graphics 4000] (rev 09)

Since the video card isn't working yet, I'm doing all this with HDMI plugged into the mobo's built-in HDMI slot, so I suppose this makes sense?

Next, I imported the Nvidia GPG key and APT repository, installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers With Cuda Support (because they should "just werk"), and rebooted.
I didn't see the "conflicting nouveau kernel module loaded" error mentioned in the guide. This is likely due to my disabling Nouveau during an earlier installation attempt, so I'm assuming this isn't an issue.

After the reboot, running nvidia-smi via Terminal gets me this:
"NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running."

Not really encouraging. nvidia-settings gets you a GUI window, but you get a few errors and a lot of empty space as you can see in the attached screenshot.


Any idea of what I'm doing wrong here?

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz x 4
CPU cooler: generic aftermarket fan
Motherboard: ASUSTeK model: P8Z77-V v: Rev 1.xx
BIOS version: 2104 (released sept. 2013, latest version)
Ram: 16 GB DDR3 1333 MHz (two sets of different ram)
SSD/HDD: Corsair Force 3 SSD 91.1 GB
GPU: Intel Corporation IvyBridge GT2 [HD Graphics 4000]
PSU: Corsair RM750e ATX Power Supply (80 Plus Gold, 750 watts max output, bought new last year)
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 bookworm(x86-64)
OS kernel: 6.1.0-23-amd64

Errata:
-It's entirely possible downloading the .run from Nvidia's website, failing to get that going, and uninstalling it has gummed something up in hard-to-trace ways, but I'm not reinstalling the whole system unless I gotta. This previous attempt is why Nouveau was disabled before doing all this.

-Yes, sticking a 2021-era video card (Geforce RTX 3060) on a 2012-era mobo (ASUSTeK P8Z77-V) is a potential issue and will cause bottlenecks if it works. I want to confirm what is happening before throwing money at the problem, though I am obviously throwing time at the problem.