I saw that NVIDIA released new Linux drivers so I decided to install them. Worked great with just one catch. OpenGL stopped working. :( Never fear! I got it working again.

I run Debian unstable at home and libc is built with tls. I'm really not sure what that means, but the NVIDIA drivers make a big deal about it. They install the tls versions of the libraries by default since it detects it in my libc. But that really doesn't work. I kept getting this error:

/usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1: unresolved symbol: _nv000021gl

I did a strings on libGL.so.1 and that symbol is there, among a bazillion others. I finally remembered that I had problems with the last version of the driver for this same reason. It's been a while so I didn't think of it right off. Here's what I had to do to get the non-tls libraries installed.

# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run -a -x
# cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1
# ./nvidia-installer -a --force-tls=classic