have had good luck using nouveau driver for years. nouveau driver was default on an older nvidia card which i was trying to get CUDA running on ~GeForce 9600 .eventually did get it to work .made an Xorg.conf that had x y coordinates that were smaller than monitor maximum. GPU processing power was only double of dual-core Athlon :) on these links it mentions the need to disable nouveau driver http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers http://www.cyberciti.biz/howto/debian-linux/install-nvidia-proprietary-unix-driver/ older link from 2012 describing Debian 6 with Quadro FX 3800M " Create a file as follows disable-nouveau.conf: # vi /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nouveau.conf Append the following code: # Disable nouveau blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0 " i would be tempted to create a small file using echo >> rather than vi To unsubscribe send to ncolug-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field.