How do I… install Nvidia Drivers on Debian (or Proxmox)?

I have installed Nvidia drivers using the official run-file from Nvidia (Unix Driver Archive), and when it is time to update I always forget how to do all the steps. So here is the notes I have taken for my future self:

Download the run-file

Go to the Manual Driver Search and find the latest driver for the GPU model. Go to the corresponding download page and copy the URL from the Download Now button

SSH into the machine that needs an update and download the driver there:

wget <download-url>

In this particular case it was this version:

wget https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/580.65.06/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.65.06.run

Make the run-file executable:

chmod +x <filename>

In this particular case it was:

chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.65.06.run

Uninstall the previous driver

When installing the driver using the run-file, Nvidia will also install the uninstaller script and other scripts here: /usr/bin/nvidia-*. It might not be necessary to uninstall previous versions, perhaps unless you are downgrading. For my case, since installing on a server, I like to clean up any unused packages.

Run the uninstaller:

/usr/bin/nvidia-uninstall

Select “No”

Installing the new driver

Run the installer and build the kernel modules. Run with the –dkms flag to automatically rebuild kernel modules when the kernel is updated:

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.65.06.run --dkms

Test the installation by running nvidia-smi. The output should be something like this:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.65.06              Driver Version: 580.65.06      CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX **** Ti     Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   52C    P0             37W /  180W |       0MiB /   8192MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------