Inconsistencies between the nvidia installer and the nvidia-driver package.

[Tomaz Fogaça]

Hello,

First of all I'd like to thank you for your great work on maintaining the
nvidia packages for Debian. It really is a great addition to the Debian
system and makes life easier for anyone who wants to get their graphics
cards up and running as fast as possible, while sticking to Debian policy.

Thing is, lately I've struck some weird inconsistencies between the
nvidia-driver package and the nvidia installer provided by nvidia
themsleves, and I was wondering if you could help me out. Maybe it's a bug,
maybe it's just policy differences, maybe it's an nvidia's optimus related
problem, maybe it's a Debian alternative's issue, but it exists nonetheless.

Whenever I try installing the Nvida drivers/libraries through the installer
provided by Nvidia themselves, I get the expected results; the drivers are
installed and the libraries are put into place so that when I have Xorg
come up, all applications requiring OpenGl work as expected. On the other
hand, if I install the 'nvidia-driver' package, which installs with it the
OpenGL, GLX and Xserver bits, and then use 'update-alternatives --config
glx' to have glx point to the nvidia implementation, I can't get my OpenGl
programs to work.  'glxinfo' gives me errors like 'Xlib:  extension "GLX"
missing on display ":0.0".' I'm doing all of this on a live system without
persistence, so that everything is pristine once I reboot. I'm also not
using any Xorg.conf file.

Now, this might be a problem with the fact that I'm doing this on an
Optimus enabled notebook (with an integrated intel GPU and a discrete
Nvidia one), and maybe I should be using Bumblebee to sort through this,
but it just bugs me that the nvidia installer makes everything work out of
the box, without calling upon the magic of "optirun myApp" or setting some
arcane options on the xorg.conf files. Isn't the nvidia-driver package
supposed to be analogous to the installer, but making it play nicely along
with the rest of the debian system? Or is the installer secretly working
some sorcery to handle the Optimus gpu switching?

I'd appreciate any enlightenment on the subject.

Thank you for your time,
Tomaz Vieira
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