Taking Cheiron at his word, I am hoping that someone can help me get started with installing the nvidia driver for the FX2700M card.
A bit of background first:
I have now got WattOS 32 bit running stably on my HP 8730w, after a lot of effort. I tried some benchmarks to check that things were more or less right. The first thing I noticed was that, compared to LXLE 64 bit, some of the benchmarks were twice as slow. I am using the 32 bit version of WattOS because I couldn't get my printer driver to play with the 64 bit version. I tried loading the 686-pae kernel and this brought most of the benchmarks more or less into line with LXLE, presumably because it was using the other core of my core duo processor. So far, so good. The one exception was the FPU raytracing benchmark (part of the hardinfo package). It was only running at about a quarter of the speed that I achieved on LXLE. I still have the 64 bit version of WattOS installed, that I abandoned after failing to set up the printer driver. This gave me similar performance to LXLE. On exploring further I found that the Nouveau driver in WattOS 32 bit didn't seem to be recognising the graphics card and wasn't doing "direct rendering". I believe that the FPU raytracing benchmark uses the GPU if it can and hence the difference. That left me with two options - get Nouveau working or load the non-free nvidia driver. I have read elsewhere that the nvidia driver is much better, particularly for 3D and CUDA, and decided that would be worth trying.
The nvidia web site says the version 340 driver is the one for my graphics card. It also says that rather than follow their rather convoluted installation process I may be better using the one for my distro as it could manage a lot of the interactions. I had a look in Synaptic Package Manager and, sure enough, there are a lot of nvidia driver packages. I then had to guess what package to try to install (I have cloned the partition in case I mess things up completely). A likely candidate seemed to be the nvidia version 340 binary kernel module for my 686-pae kernel. However, this came up as broken. I did a more specific search for nvidia-driver and the only one that came up was the version 304 legacy driver.
This site looked promising:
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDriversHowever, my system doesn't recognise the aptitude command. I was able to load the linux headers for my kernel in Synaptic Package Manager but got stuck trying to do the next line:
aptitude -t wheezy-backports -r install nvidia-kernel-dkms
Synaptic Package Manager doesn't seem to have an nvidia-kernel-dkms for version 340. It only does one for version 304 and some other legacy ones. Is that why the kernel module for version 340 came up as broken?
Any help on where to go next, or an explanation of how this all actually works, would be appreciated.
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