So I wanted to install my NVIDIA drivers and I knew it would ask for some awesome kernel headers.
In operating systems that use yum, you could use:

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint">yum install kernel-headers</pre><p></p>

You may also want to try:

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint">yum groupinstall "Development Tools"</pre><p></p>

..which will install development tools on your system.

But in Debian/Ubuntu based distributions, you should use the following which installs “build-essential” packages which will help provide NVIDIA and other driver based installers everything they need to tailor the driver for your system including gcc, make, and dpkg-dev.

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint">apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.32-5-all-amd64</pre><p></p>

After this, just drop to a tty session, stop gdm/X, make the NVIDIA installer executable, and run it.

Have fun.
Of course be sure to sub in your kernel type and architecture.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.