Bug#813541: nvidia-graphics-drivers: Huge problems 'upgrading' to legacy version

[Andreas Beckmann]

Hi Manuel,

On 2016-02-02 23:56, Manuel Bilderbeek wrote:
> I did my daily testing dist-upgrade just now, and I noticed I got a version of
> the nvidia driver that is not going to work with my old GeForce 9600. I got a
> nice pop up that the driver is not going to work, so I chose 'No', to not
> install it.
> 
> But afterwards, many packages of 352 were actually installed after all.
> 
> I tried to install all the proper 340xx legacy packages, but as they didn't
> conflict with the normal packages, all the normal stuff was also still
> installed. Apparently that gave a lot of problems, because after booting I only
> got a very blinky text console and no X.

The current and legacy drivers are intended to be coinstallable.

To switch to the -legacy driver while (parts of) -current is still
installed, you could just use the new command

  update-glx --config nvidia

We should probably advertise this more on the legacy warning screen.

> After manually removing all packages of the 352 version and changing 'nvidia'
> in /etc/modules-load.d/nvidia.conf to 'nvidia-legacy-340xx' I finally got a
> working X11 again....
> 
> Why did I have to do all that manual work to get X11 working again?
> Which package owns that nvidia.conf anyway? I couldn't find it...

That depends ... on the setting of the alternatives. :-)


Andreas