Allgemein

Samuel Henrique: Latest NVIDIA Drivers for Debian (Packaged with AI)

Von Markus Leitermann 29.03.2026 Loading...

tl;dr

This is not an official package, it’s good enough for me and it might be good
enough for you, confirmed as working in Debian Testing but I don’t have a
Stable machine to test there.

You can use my custom repo to install the latest NVIDIA drivers on Debian
Stable, Testing or Unstable (install from Sid repository):

https://deb.debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/

The page above contains the APT sources you need, just add the one for your
release to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai.sources, run sudo apt update and install the packages, you might need to disable Secure Boot.

This is not about AI

Discussions about AI are quite divisive in the Free Software communities, and
there’s so much to be said about it that I’m not willing to go into in this
blog post. This is rather just me telling people that if they need up-to-date
NVIDIA packages for Debian, they could check if my custom repository gets the
job done.

The AI part is a means to an end, I’ve been careful to note in the repository
names that the packages were produced with AI to respect people who do not want
to run it for any reason.

RTX 5000 series support

Back in May 2025 I opened a bug
report asking for
the NVIDIA drivers on Debian to be updated to support the RTX 5000 series. The
Nouveau drivers might be good enough for some people, but I need the NVIDIA
drivers because I want to play games and do experiments with open weight
models.

Opening a bug report doesn’t guarantee anything, at the end of the day Debian
Developers are volunteers, so if I really wanted the newer drivers, I would
have to do something about it, ideally submitting a merge request.

I briefly looked into the NVIDIA packaging, which involves 3 source packages
(and one extra git repo for tarballs), unfortunately this was going to take
more time and effort than what I was willing to spend.

What I Did

After a few weeks of lamenting that I wasn’t running the NVIDIA drivers, I
figured I was willing to put in more effort than I originally thought, just
enough to instruct the Claude Code agent to package the latest releases. I’m
skilled enough with agentic tools that I knew how to use it to save time;
providing a clear instruction on how to build the package and explaining the
packaging layout, then letting the agent iterate until it gets a working build.
The agent was running inside a VM that didn’t have any of my credentials.

After a little bit of back and forth, where I was reviewing the changes guiding
the agent into how to fix certain issues, I ended up with a working set of
packages.

Once I installed it on my machine and confirmed they worked, I set up a
debusine repository to make it easier to
install future updates, and let others test it out.

Debusine is analogous to Ubuntu’s famous PPA, or Fedora’s EPEL, it’s a
relatively new project but it has been working fine for this.

Matheus Polkorny helped me test the packages and did spot a few issues which
are fixed now. The Debusine developers were also always quick to respond to my
questions and bug
reports.

How Good Is It?

Short answer: good enough for daily use, but not a substitute for an official Debian package.

The whole point of doing this is because I don’t have enough free time to
maintain the package myself. All of this work was done as a volunteer, on my
personal time.

This means I’m trusting the agent to some degree; I review its commits but I
don’t go too deep into it, the quality will be dictated by the fact that I’m
a Debian Developer and so by how easily I can spot issues without double checking
everything.

I only have a single machine with an NVIDIA GPU, this machine runs Debian
Testing and so I don’t have a way to test the Stable packages. I can do my best
to address problems but at this point there is a risk that new updates break
something.

Installing NVIDIA drivers has always been a bit risky regardless, if you’re
comfortable with reverting updates and handling a system without a graphical
interface (in case you end up in a tty), you will be fine.

You will likely need to disable Secure Boot in order to use them, or set up your
BIOS so that a MOK can be used to sign the DKMS modules.

When choosing the version strings for the packages, I was careful enough to
pick something that would sort lower than an official Debian package, meaning
that whenever that same version is packaged in Debian, your system will see it
as an upgrade.

If you have any other methods of installing the NVIDIA drivers on your Debian
system that is working for you, you should likely stick to that.

I have a strong preference for installing them through .deb packages, making
the package sort out configuration changes and dependency updates, besides
handling the DKMS modules.

Ultimately I’m not happy with the amount of difficulty that Debian users have in
installing up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, and I hope this makes it easier for some.

How To Install

Head over to the Debusine page that contains both repos for Trixie (Debian
Stable) and Sid (for Debian Testing and Unstable):

https://deb.debusine.debian.net/debian/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai/

If you are running Debian Testing, then pick the Sid repository.

That page contains the contents of the apt .sources file you need, create the
file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r-samueloph-nvidia-ai.sources with the sources for your release.

Run sudo apt update and install the packages you need, if you already have a
previous version installed, sudo apt upgrade --update would update them.

If there are no upgrades, meaning you don’t have a previous version installed,
then you need to explicitly install them.

sudo apt install nvidia-open-kernel-dkms nvidia-driver

If you run into issues in Debian Stable, consider using the Linux kernel package
from the backports repository, if you need an up-to-date NVIDIA driver, you
likely should also be running the backports kernel package (if you can’t
upgrade to Debian Testing).

Future Plans

I currently have no means of measuring how many people are using the debusine
repositories, so if you do end up using it feel free to let me know somehow.

I don’t know for how long I will keep managing this repository, and how much
effort I will spend, but my machine needs it and for now I will keep it
up-to-date with the latest production-grade NVIDIA drivers.