Bug#749264: No nvidia-driver working

[Karsten Malcher]

Hello Adrian,

Am 08.08.2014 12:58, schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
> On 08/08/2014 12:43 PM, Karsten Malcher wrote:
>> Fact is that it is impossible to simply upgrade an system without thrown
>> back into an text shell!
> Well, blame nVidia for their shitty driver, but please don't blame
> us Debian people. The proprietary driver is really difficult to
> handle owed to the fact that most parts are closed source and
> only a small fraction of it, the kernel module glue or shim code,
> is open source.

I don't want to blame you or other Debian people!
It only think it would be very helpful when a package will cause a running X after installation when it exists.
This is one of the (only) things that is working better in the installation of Kubuntu.
Really good was and is the detection in Knoppix - why this is not possible in Debian?

>
> We can't really fix things which are binary-only. The proprietary
> driver is really a bitch to maintain and you should be aware
> that for most Debian Developers, the maintainer job is something
> they do in their free time and they're not getting paid for it.

I know - and the time for testing and reporting bugs is not payed either.
But we do it because we believe it is senseful (or at least i do it).

>
> As for that matter, I am using the free nouveau driver and I never
> run into any upgrade issues. So, you can either use the free driver
> or don't use an nVidia card on Linux at all. As I said, you are
> barking up the wrong tree.

Really?
It's nearly impossible to buy graphic cards with no 3D functionality now.
So it is a great pity only to use it as tea warmer.
For me it is really amazing and useful to use some of the opengl effects that are possible.
And there are more and more game developer, who are going to use free 3D engines to make it possible to avoid Windows 
(see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Spiel-Engines).

>
>> (And often you loose the ability for sound and other multimedia too).
> How is that related to the nVidia driver?

Why i set it in brackets? :-)

>
>> This can happen also after an simple upgrade in the same distribution
>> version.
>> I have installed Linux (Kubuntu and Debian) on the PC's of two normal
>> users.
>> First they where very happy to get rid of the world of windows terror.
>> But now both where back to windows because it is unacceptable to get an
>> unusable PC after an simple upgrade!
> Well, my mom has been rocking Ubuntu on her Asus eeePC for quite
> a while now and she never complained.

Yes - it's the same with a friend of mine.
But he also does not really use Multimedia features.

>
>> In jessie im am feeling the same way, because nothing seems to work.
>> No X, chaotic kernel versions and everything seems to loose in chaos.
> Well, Jessie is a *testing* distribution and therefore unreleased. You
> shouldn't actually be using it unless you know what you are doing. If
> you want something *stable*, you should actually use Debian stable
> and not testing.

I use stable and i am happy!
But you are correct - maybe i expect to much here.
In the history it was no problem to wait about half of a year after one Debian was stable and then move to Testing again.
This time it seems to need much more time to get in Beta state ...

>
> I mean, you are not using beta versions of MacOS X or Windows either,
> are you?

I always use what is running stable or nearly stable.
But after a time i am curious for the testing version or need newer versions of some applications.
At least this is testing on another partition and helping to find bugs.

>
>> Maybe wheezy is the last usable Debian version you can really work with.
> That's probably related to the fact that Debian Wheezy *is* actually
> a current stable release.

Yes - i will not complain about bugs in testing any more. :-)

>
>> I hope you will understand what i want to say?
> Well, you are complaining about beta software breaking your system
> if I am getting this right.

No - i am complaining that it is still a pain to get a running X-system after so much years of Linux.
Before wheezy i never could get X running without installation of the original NVidia drivers.
Now it seems to be impossible to get it running - what a progress?
In the history i always was damned too from Debian people to use the NVidia driver instead of the packages.
But what shall i do?

>
>> But i am talking about the reasons why Linux have no chance to get an
>> accepted OS to work with.
> Look, I don't actually care what people consider an accepted OS. Where
> I work, we deploy Debian Wheezy on over 150 desktops and since we are
> running a stable version, we are hardly having any issues. In fact, we
> usually have less issues than with the Windows 7 machines that we
> deploy as well.

That's really interesting and a good reference to use Linux as desktop system.
But you or a service team look for the problems and not the user itself - correct?

It would be wonderful if there could be always a running fallback for X if something goes wrong.
Then Linux could be an alternative for nearly every user.
This can't be realized in the drivers - only in the distribution and of course in the X system.

>
>> Is it only intended for server use?
> Is this supposed to be a flame bait?

No - sorry for that.

>>> That's already enough to get X up and running with the proprietary
>>> drivers. The rest can be configured using xrandr.
>> I tried it but it does not work.
>> Please remember that i set up a new clean installation.
> Then you should consider filing a bug report against nVidia's bug
> tracker, if there is something like that, since we have no way
> to fix bugs in closed-source software.

O.K.
I will try a new plain installation of the current Testing and then i will test with the original NVidia driver when the 
Debian package fails.
When the original NVidia driver fails i will open a bug against NVidia.
Maybe i should wait some additional time so that jessie gets more stable ...

>> When nouveau is really the intended standard, then we need no modern
>> PC's with 3D graphic cards any more.
> Well, I'm using nouveau and I'm happy with it.

I am not - and there are more users who want to use OpenGL out there.
Specially persons who want to play.

> You are not really providing a useful bug report which would help
> us fixing actual bugs. Thus, I would rather consider closing this
> bug report or at least tag it with "moreinfo" since the information
> you provided does not really reveal any bugs to me.

You are the maintainer.
It's correct that at this point i can't give more information to solve the problem.
But maybe you are so kind to think a little bit about the usability for normal users.

Karsten