Since the first week of this last November, the closed Linux Steam beta has been underway. I think the latest official count of Linux beta users is somewhere near 80,000 gamers. That is a pretty impressive closed beta headcount considering that is more than 1% of the active 5 million users who use Steam daily. It is really an exciting time for all the Linux desktop users. As the introduction of Steam has encouraged GPU OEMs to improve their Linux video drivers. Also, some of the game developers participating in the Linux beta have been supporting their customers and fixing bugs, even for those not officially included in the closed beta program.

On to the point of this blog post, as I mentioned, the Steam Linux beta has led to many Linux video driver improvements from major GPU vendors. As of this post, there have been several experimental NVidia driver releases with major bugfixes and performance improvements for Linux users. The NVidia experimental driver releases have perhaps happened so quickly that it isn’t feasible to re-package every iteration for Ubuntu/Debian users.

Read on if you would like to re-package the NVidia experimental releases, in a .deb package for yourself. The point of using the .deb packaging is to maintain the ability to upgrade to an official Ubuntu/Debian package using native package management as newer releases become available in officially supported repositories.

Experimental NVidia drivers as deb packages

The package maintainer for the nvidia-graphics-drivers has general build guidelines here. If you’re desperate for the new drivers via Ubuntu packaging, you can rebuild them with the 310.19, or 313.09 packages. Here is the process I followed to install the latest NVidia Beta drivers from deb packages. The major version bump to 313.09 is a slightly different process. I could not find any automated way to regenerate the names of the packaging templates to match the version increase.

Minor version bump 310.14 – 310.19

1. cd /usr/src (you’ll need src group membership to write to /usr/src)
2. apt-get source nvidia-experimental-310
3. sudo apt-get build-dep nvidia-experimental-310
4. sudo apt-get install devscripts
5. cd nvidia-current && rm -f *.run
6. Download both NVIDIA-Linux-x86-310.19.run and NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.19.run.
   • Move those to your build directory, which should be your current working directory.
7. tar zcvf ../nvidia-graphics-drivers-experimental-310_310.19.orig.tar.gz --exclude debian .
8. dch -i
   • Edit the changelog, making sure to bump the version on the tom line from 310.14 to 310.19. Might get a warning that the source directory changed.
9. debclean
10. debuild
11. cd /usr/src (Your new .deb files should be in /usr/src)
12. sudo dpkg -i nvidia-experimental-310_310.19-0ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb

Major version bump 310.14 –> 313.09

1. cd /usr/src (you’ll need src group membership to write to /usr/src)
2. apt-get source nvidia-experimental-310
3. sudo apt-get build-dep nvidia-experimental-310
4. sudo apt-get install devscripts
5. cd nvidia-experimental-310 && rm -f *.run
6. Download both NVIDIA-Linux-x86-313.09.run and NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.09.run.
   • Move those to your build directory, which should be your current working directory.
7. tar zcvf ../nvidia-graphics-drivers-experimental-313_313.09.orig.tar.gz --exclude debian .
8. dch --package nvidia-graphics-drivers-experimental-313 --newversion 313.09-0ubuntu0.1
   • Edit the changelog. Might get a warning that the source directory changed.
9. cd debian
10. rename 's/(nvidia-experimental)-310(.*\.in)/$1-313$2/' *.in
    • Rename the .in templates for the major version bump.
11. cd ..
12. debclean
13. debuild
14. cd /usr/src (Your new .deb files should be in /usr/src)
15. sudo dpkg -i nvidia-experimental-313_313.09-0ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb