Bug#761062: Upgrading from 304.117-1 to 340.32-1 with older graphics card leaves system without X Windows

[Andreas Beckmann]

On 2014-09-12 10:37, Vincent Cheng wrote:
> I'd like to point out that the various nvidia packages are (supposed
> to be) co-installable, letting you pick what driver series to use at
> runtime rather than during package installation (and the kernel
> modules are patched so that they're versioned as well), so I don't
> think we should forcefully fail package installation attempts of
> nvidia drivers that aren't compatible with the user's hardware. Again,
> probably a debconf prompt invoking nvidia-detect at some point would
> be appropriate.

We already have a NEWS entry about the legacy stuff - but nobody reads
that or uses apt-listchanges.

We could probably reuse the approach I used for fglrx-driver in wheezy
where AMD removed support for some legacy hardware ... and created a
legacy driver that has not been maintained for newer Xorg versions ...

Raw outline: While installing or upgrading to the current (not a legacy)
nvidia-driver (not sure which package this should go to) we have a
debconf prompt in preinst that reports *unsupported* hardware (having
*no* supported hardware in a system is not an error) and asks whether to
proceed or abort. The answer will be remembered for future upgrades.
This check can be disabled via preseeding to allow unattended
installations in such setups - the admin probably knows what he does in
this case.
We probably need two cases here: totally unsupported and
legacy-supported, giving hints about the legacy package to install instead.

nvidia-detect is probably *not* the tool for this task.


Andreas