How To Install Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Nvidia GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have a wide variety of uses, from gaming to 3D rendering, and visualization. If your Computer has NVIDIA Graphic cards, Install Nvidia Graphic Driver to improve Graphics related performance.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Nvidia Drivers on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install linux-headers-amd64

Step 2. Identification of Nvidia graphics processing unit.

Before installing any Nvidia drivers, run the following command to check whether your computer has an Nvidia GPU installed or not:

lspci| egrep 'VGA|NVIDIA'

Step 3. Installing Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11.

By default, Nvidia Drivers is not available on Debian 11 base repository. NVIDIA drivers are available on the official contrib and non-free package. Meanwhile, In Debian, the official contrib and non-free package repositories are not enabled by default.  Run the following command at first to enable them:

sudo apt-add-repository contrib
sudo apt-add-repository non-free

Now, it’s time to install NVIDIA drivers on Debian using the following command below:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver linux-image-amd64

Once the installation completes, reboot your system with:

reboot

After logging back in, run the “nvidia-smi” command to confirm the new Nvidia Drivers have been installed:

nvidia-smi

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nvidia Drivers. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nvidia website.