thinking of use latest nvidia on wheezy

[Luca Boccassi]

On 31 December 2015 at 22:01, Ross Boylan <rossboylan at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> Hi, nvidia packagers.  Thanks for your work, and happy new year.
>
> I have a 980 Ti that I would like to use at a higher resolution than
> 1024x768.  My amd64 system is running wheezy.  Any tips on getting
> this to work?  If it won't work, that would be a useful tip too.
>
> I was thinking of combing the latest sources from nvidia, which seem
> to be 352.63,* with the Debian packaging.  I see on
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=787582 that getting
> things working even on jessie has been difficult.
>
> I'm also unclear where the project repository is.
> https://sources.debian.net/src/nvidia-graphics-drivers/unstable/ and
> messages on this list suggest it's in subversion, but
> https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pkg-nvidia/packages/nvidia-graphics-drivers/trunk/debian/README.source?revision=5451&view=markup
> indicates using git.
>
> I'm not a DD, and only want read access.
>
> I suppose I could just execute the installer from nvidia, but then I'd
> have no control over what it did and, I suspect, no reliable way to
> back it out.
>
> Ross Boylan
>
> * Though I notice branches for 355 and 358 in the repo.

Hello Ross,

Happy new year!

First of all, wheezy is oldstable now, so I would really recommend
upgrading to jessie if possible, as it would make your life so much
easier.

I haven't personally tried to backport 352 to wheezy, so no
guarantees. And it goes without saying that it's all unsupported and
might light your keyboard on fire etc etc :-)

Once 352 moves out of experimental, it just might end up being
uploaded to wheezy-backports too eventually, but no promises, and most
importantly no timeline.

The nvidia-graphics-driver source is in SVN:
https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pkg-nvidia/packages/nvidia-graphics-drivers/

But I would not recommend building sources from the repository, as it
might contain unreleased and potentially unstable changes. Instead,
it's safer to build the sources from experimental since they are tried
and tested.

If you add the deb-src for experimental to your sources, you can
simply do (warning, I'm away from my dev machines so I'm writing from
memory, might need tweaking):

sudo apt-get build-dep nvidia-driver glx-alternative-nvidia
apt-get source -b -t experimental glx-alternative-nvidia
apt-get source -b -t experimental nvidia-driver

The only dependency that needs backporting should be the
glx-alternative packages, everything else should be fine in theory, if
memory serves.

Alternatively from adding deb-src, you can simply manually download
the tarballs (both .orig and .debian) for those 2 sources separately
from packages.debian.org, untar and use: debuild -uc -us to manually
build. The build-dep stage is necessary in both cases.

Good luck :-)

Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi