thinking of use latest nvidia on wheezy

[Ross Boylan]

Thanks very much.  I guess the easiest thing is to try building the
experimental packages on wheezy.

I guess I'll have to get the packages somewhat manually, since
$ apt-get source -t experimental glx-alternative-nvidia
Reading package lists... Done
E: The value 'experimental' is invalid for APT::Default-Release as
such a release is not available in the sources

This is after adding
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
to sources.list, doing aptitude update, which showed the indices being
retrieved, and then doing apt-get update in case that was needed.
aptitude update showed
Get: 1 http://ftp.us.debian.org experimental/main Sources/DiffIndex [27.8 kB]
Ign http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy/non-free Translation-en_US
Ign http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy/non-free Translation-en
Get: 2 http://ftp.us.debian.org experimental/contrib Sources/DiffIndex [1,195 B]
Get: 3 http://ftp.us.debian.org experimental/non-free
Sources/DiffIndex [1,885 B]
Fetched 30.9 kB in 6s (4,974 B/s)

Also, since the packages aren't installed, and wouldn't be the right
version anyway, I'll check the control files manually for build-deps.

Ross

P.S. A couple of attempts at booting a wheezy system with the monitor
but without any special nvidia  packages  produced only a blank
screen.  Is that to be expected?  I'm having trouble getting the
alternate system booting working, and so the problem might be there
instead.

On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 4:49 AM, Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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