Bug#749264: No nvidia-driver working

[Vincent Cheng]

Hi Karsten,

On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 3:38 AM, Karsten Malcher
<debian at home.decotrain.de> wrote:
> 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.

Fix your smtp server so that it stops timing out.

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

No, just install nvidia-glx-legacy-173xx (as suggested by
nvidia-detect); its dependencies will ensure that you have a working
nvidia 173.xx driver installed. Installing nvidia-kernel-dkms on
wheezy will actually pull in the default 304.xx driver series, which
is obviously not what you want. If you take a look at the log file you
attached in your followup message...

[    42.428] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module  304.117  Tue Nov 26 21:45:09 PST 2013

[    42.445] (WW) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 GPU installed
in this system is
[    42.445] (WW) NVIDIA(0):     supported through the NVIDIA
173.14.xx Legacy drivers.
[    42.445] (WW) NVIDIA(0):     Please visit
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for
[    42.445] (WW) NVIDIA(0):     more information.  The 304.117 NVIDIA
driver will ignore
[    42.445] (WW) NVIDIA(0):     this GPU.  Continuing probe...
[    42.445] (EE) No devices detected.

It's no surprise that X won't load, given that you're trying to use
the nvidia 304.xx driver series with hardware that doesn't support it.

> 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?

nouveau should work, yes; if it doesn't, please file a bug against the
kernel. Have you tried fetching a kernel from wheezy-backports and
seeing if you can run nouveau using a newer kernel?

Regards,
Vincent