Installing Nvidia 330M Driver

[mixit]

Nvidia has not yet released a linux driver supporting the 300M series. Using current nvidia drivers, you will boot to a blank screen. Here is the workaround I found online. I thought I'd share it with the backtrack community to save some headaches.

Download the driver from here:

NVIDIA DRIVERS 195.36.15 Certified

I downloaded it in windows and ran it from backtrack. You may also be able to use the backtrack-nvidia package and follow the rest of this tutorial, but I have not verified this.

Go to the download directory and run

./nvidia-linux-x86-195.36.15-pkg1.run

Finish the install, then reboot into windows (Yes, I'm assuming dual booting windows). Then download and install the following program, which we will use to exract the EDID from the windows registry. There may be other ways to create the EDID file, but this is how I did it:

Download Phoenix EDID Designer - Freeware Software - Tucows

From the tools menu, choose load an EDID file from the registry. Then choose to export it from the file menu, and be sure to select the raw 128 byte file format. Save this somewhere accessible and boot back into backtrack.

Move the EDID.raw file you saved in windows to /etc/X11.

Now since you can't startx, use vi to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add the following lines to the "Device" section of the xorg.conf file

Option         "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
Option         "CustomEDID" "DFP-0: /etc/X11/EDID.raw"

Where it has /etc/X11/EDID.raw, insert the name of your EDID.raw file you moved over from windows. That's it. Save the xorg.conf file and you should now be able to startx. Hopefully this helps someone. Let me know if I missed anything.