Ytdyklly

I'm trying to install the nvidia-driver for Debian.

I've read everywhere that the correct solution is to run sudo apt install nvidia-driver and the driver should install itself without problems.

However this command leaves me with the output

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have

requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable

distribution that some required packages have not yet been created

or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:



The following packages have unmet dependencies:

 nvidia-driver : Depends: nvidia-driver-libs (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                 Depends: nvidia-driver-bin (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                 Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                 Depends: nvidia-vdpau-driver (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                 Depends: nvidia-alternative (= 375.82-1~deb9u1)

                 Depends: nvidia-kernel-dkms (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) or

                          nvidia-kernel-375.82

                 Recommends: nvidia-settings (>= 375) but it is not going to be installed

                 Recommends: nvidia-persistenced

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I've tried installing the missing dependencies (like sudo apt install nvidia-driver-libs) but this just results in

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have

requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable

distribution that some required packages have not yet been created

or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:



The following packages have unmet dependencies:

 nvidia-driver-libs : Depends: libgl1-nvidia-glvnd-glx (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed or

                               libgl1-nvidia-glx (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                      Depends: nvidia-egl-icd (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed or

                               libegl1-nvidia (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                      Recommends: nvidia-driver-libs-i386

                      Recommends: libopengl0-glvnd-nvidia but it is not going to be installed

                      Recommends: libglx-nvidia0 (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                      Recommends: libgles-nvidia1 (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                      Recommends: libgles-nvidia2 (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                      Recommends: libnvidia-cfg1 (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

                  Recommends: nvidia-vulkan-icd (= 375.82-1~deb9u1) but it is not going to be installed

How do I install the nvidia-driver with apt?

You need to enable the non-free repositories:

sudo sed -i.bak 's/stretch[^ ]* main$/& contrib non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Then run apt update and try your installation again. You’ll probably also need to install the kernel headers if you haven’t already:

sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

See the full instructions on the Debian wiki.

Since this doesn't have an accepted answer yet, I'll go ahead and chip in what worked for me. I was having a very similar issue, with many of the same packages complaining, but there were an additional two PreDepends issues that stretch-backports was not resolving. Turns out, in addition to the instructions in the wiki page Stephen posted (https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers), I needed to add contrib for stretch. That is, in /etc/apt/sources.list, I changed

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch main

to

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib

and ran apt update, after which i was able to install nvidia-drivers without issue. Hope that helps, if you're still having issues.

I had a similar problem. I solved it by removing backports from sources

from this issue https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906903

We have had this before ... having both stretch and stretch-backports
enabled and trying to track stretch does not work currently for the
nvidia driver ... too many changes w.r.t. libglvnd etc.