Can't find nVidia Driver -- AAAGH

Quantumstate · 04-06-2012, 11:05 AM

Well, I did my monthly dist-upgrade on my home theater computer last week, rebooted, and whups it can no longer find the nvidia driver. X falls to pieces in a steaming pile. I reinstalled -glx and it pretended to download and compile the new module, but SURPRISE, X still can't find it. (doy)

I am running the current Debian Testing, kept up monthly with dist-upgrades. This is an ASUS mobo with e8400 CPU and nVidia Quadro chipset. I've found that the nvidia driver is in fact being loaded (lsmod |grep nvidia). But for some reason X can't find it.

Any ideas?

jv2112 · 04-07-2012, 06:17 AM

http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphic...pace_libraries

Check out this section and the following troubleshooting section.

Quote:

How to deal with kernel changes and driver upgrades

Steps 3 and 4 are done for good. However, you'll have to repeat step 2 in certain situations. If you don't realize such a situation happens, X will fail to start. You can take two approaches with this: either remember when this will happen and try to prevent it, or remember to come back here when your X fails to start. Either way, you're not done for life. If X fails to start because of this, you can again revert step 4 (by choosing a free X driver again) and redo it when you want to retry using the nvidia driver for X.

Quantumstate · 04-12-2012, 09:22 AM

What I eventually found is that the -glx drivers are legacy, and what I actually need is the -dkms. For some reason that dist-upgrade had deinstalled my -dkms and installed the -glx, so the kernel could not find a suitable driver.

It is this kind of screwup that creates days and weeks of misery and difficulty for users. Stupid and infuriating. This should never never happen on Debian, which is supposed to be the cream of the crop.

All this time I knew I needed a -{something} driver, but I can't keep up with what the kids are calling the latest one these days.

For some reason your Debian reference still calls for the OLD -glx driver, which for current video cards is wrong, wrong, wrong.

cascade9 · 04-12-2012, 11:01 AM

The nvidia-glx drivers in 'non-free' repos for debian testing are NOT 'legacy'. Currently they are the 295.33 drivers

The 'legacy' drivers are 173.XX (for nVidia GeForce 5XXX/FX GPUs and quadro based on them) and 96.XX (for nVidia GeForce 2, 3 and 4 and quadros based on them). With the debian guide posted by jv2112, to install them legacy versions you use "nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx" or "nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx" (I'm not sure if either will work with debian testing, I doubt it, AFAIK they havent been updated to work with newer xorg versions after 1.10 and debian testing is using 1.11+)

Quantumstate · 04-13-2012, 08:49 AM

LOL, whatever. They do not work.