Bug#749264: No nvidia-driver working

[Karsten Malcher]

Hello Vincent,

i didn't get your email from Sat, 9 Aug 2014 or from the debian bug system.
So i see it today in the bug system.


> Ok, I think the discussion has derailed quite a bit from the original
> bug report...

Yes - sorry - but the problem is still alive.

> Karsten, I can sympathize with you, but to address your concern that
> the packages are "broken" and that we should be doing better, I'd say
> that the current nvidia packages in Debian are doing the utmost
> possible to make installing of the proprietary nvidia drivers as
> painless as possible (much of it thanks to Andreas, of course). Let me
> explain what we already have:
> ...

I really see this and your work is great!

But i only report here what i experience in the reality with my PC's.
I don't think that this is an extraordinary hardware.

One additional example from today:

On a PC the NVidia VGA card died and i have to replace it.
It is older hardware and i have a replacement that i simply installed.

Now i installed the packages nvidia-detect and nvidia-xconfig.

# nvidia-detect
Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] [10de:0322] (rev a1)
Your card is only supported up to the 173.14 legacy drivers series.
It is recommended to install the
     nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx
package.

So i installed
# aptitude install nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx nvidia-kernel-dkms

After renaming the xorg.conf and reboot i land on the console!
The error is "no screens found".

I started nvidia-xconfig and a new xorg.conf has been generated.
It shows:

Section "Monitor"
     Identifier     "Monitor0"
     VendorName     "Unknown"
     ModelName      "Unknown"
     HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0
     VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0
     Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
     Identifier     "Device0"
     Driver         "nvidia"
     VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
     Identifier     "Screen0"
     Device         "Device0"
     Monitor        "Monitor0"
     DefaultDepth    24
     SubSection     "Display"
         Depth       24
     EndSubSection
EndSection

Reboot - but nothing - the error "no screens found" still remains!

So again i don't know what to do?
What i am doing - it does not work!

> Given the constraints (i.e. the fact that the proprietary nvidia
> drivers are non-free, can't be installed by default, and how X is
> configured), I honestly don't know how/where you expect Debian to do
> better.

For a usable system with X there should be always a running fallback like in windows.
It should be nouveau for NVidia.

I don't know exactly what Knoppix is doing, but here you get a running X in nearly all cases!?
Why this is not possible in Debian?

> The packages work (at least, for me, and likely for many other
> users, given the high popcon count and relatively low number of bugs),
> and we (as in the pkg-nvidia team...well, mostly Andreas) have done
> our best to make the entire process as painless as possible. I mean,
> sure, there could be a bug somewhere that's caused by the packages,
> but I'm not seeing it.

I believe this, but for me i always live in pain to get a running X.
This i experienced on many different systems in many years.
I am feeling it is running more and more worse than better.
(Maybe because there is more and more different hardware out there.)
But the future cannot be to boot Debian and have just a console with "have a lot of fun" like in the beginning of Linux.
Then you must invest days to get a running X ...

Best regards
Karsten