nvidia-glx-amd64 won't upgrade due to conflicting library
 

Hi All,

I have been searching forums and bug reports trying to figure this out, but I'm afraid the solutions I find don't fix my problem, and some of the suggestions I find are specific to the OP's particular system. I'm not savvy enough to translate that into something I can use on mine, unfortunately. So anyway, I don't even remember why at this point, but I was attempting to do an aptitude update/upgrade for an unrelated issue, when the upgrade of the nvidia-glx package failed. Here is the output from aptitude:

I figured I could at least try and see where libGL.so.1.2 actually is, and found the following:

So it looks like I have 3 versions of the same library. It looks like one links to another (which is the i386 version), whereas the third is the 64 bit version. For the record, I am using a 64 bit system.

How should I go about correcting this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
wolverene13

Here's the core of it.

/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 is from Mesa, not part of Nvidia's binary blob.
/usr/lib/libGL.so.<nvidia-version-number> is what Nvidia call their conflicting library. Both the binaries are in /usr/lib/, and you point the symlinks (e.g. libGL.so, & libGL.so.1) at the one you need. That process somehow went wrong. Try this command
The symlinks have to point to Nvidia's libs for their binary blob to work. They point to Mesa libs if you're running OSS drivers. Choose, and make it so.

It's not just libGL.so - they change 2 or 3 libs.

Thanks for the info - I ran the command that you suggested, and here's the output. However I see only simlinks to mesa related libraries and not "regular" libraries. Should there be NVIDIA related stuff here?

I would agree.

What happens when you reinstall the nvidia binary blob?

It yells at me saying that I can't install the .run file because I installed the NVIDIA drivers from the Debian repo. Should I maybe uninstall the existing drivers and reinstall from the repo? Or should I do the same, and retry the .run file manually?

I would uninstall & reinstall, and do it with the repo first. If the repo is far behind the website version,c heck everything is supported.


If that fails, I might try the binary drivers. But I'd watch it closely. Log actions and check it. Debian do a couple of things differently than other distros.

Well that certainly didn't go well. See below.

It looks like even when uninstalling, it can't because there's unconfigured packages that fall victim to the conflicting library issue too.

Street! Do you often get that from dpkg?


This would happen if you uninstalled under X, as it would be using the driver then. Can you shut down to run level 3 or so and try there?

Sorry for the huge time lapse, I just got back to this. I believe I fixed it, although it was a bit unorthodox. I merely removed the simlink for /usr/lib/libGL.so.1, /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2, and removed /usr/lib/mesa-diverted/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.2 altogether, then did an update/upgrade (which finally worked) and reinstalled nvidia-glx to put everything back together. Do you know of any way to check and see that everything is working other than maybe rebooting and making sure video still works?

Nevermind, figured it out. I also had to reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx to add the /usr/lib/mesa-diverted/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.2 part back in, then create the simlinks to /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 and /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 because certain things started complaining that they couldn't find those two rascals. Thanks for the help!

It's usually a case of either or, I.e Mesa's or Nvidia's libGL.so stuff. Glad you are sorted.