Information Technology

About ¾ of a year later I did my next try with installing NVIDIA CUDA on Debian lenny, mainly because I wanted to try GpuCV, a GPU-accelerated computer vision library that’s partly compliant with OpenCV. Debian is still not officially supported by NVIDIA, but the finally upcoming release of lenny and NVIDIA’s support for the rather recent Ubuntu 8.04 (2008/04) have a very positive effect: CUDA 2.1 Beta works out of the box, and this with lenny’s GCC 4.3! The only thing I had to consider is to install libxmu-dev and libc6-dev-i386 (for my 64-bit CPU) to make CUDA’s examples compile. Also, in order to actually execute the examples, one has to rely on the NVIDIA driver version 180.06 that CUDA provides, whereas even NVIDIA’s version 180.22 fails to execute the OpenGL examples with the message

cudaSafeCall() Runtime API error in file <xxxxx.cpp>, line nnn : unknown error.

With CUDA working I could then think of compiling GpuCV from SVN. But the build relies on Premake 3.x, which is not available in Debian and has to be installed in advance. In addition, the package libglew1.5-dev is needed. Some more stumbling blocks were that I had to define the typedef unsigned long GLulong by myself. Also, and IIRC, the provided SugoiTools of GpuCV didn’t link, so I fetched and compiled them from SVN as well, and I replaced the .so-files in GpuCV’s resources directory. After that GpuCV finally compiled (except the GPUCVCamDemo, as I don’t have the cvcam lib installed). Including the lib/gnu/linux paths into the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, the GPUCVConsole demo finally runs. The next step will be to actually use that lib.