Bug#840818: nvidia-driver: Breaks system on a fresh installed debian; Buggy, but overwrites nouveau driver

[Luca Boccassi]

Control: severity -1 normal

On Sat, 2016-10-15 at 12:15 +0200, Domonkos Lezsák wrote:
> Package: nvidia-driver
> Severity: serious
> Tags: upstream
> Justification: Policy 1.1

No, it's not. If this is an issue, it is _very_ specific to one type of
machine. It is not a general issue with the packages.

> After installing nvidia-driver on a fresh installed debian (or on it's distributions too), the driver could not be loaded causes to boot in low-graphics mode.

Without kernel and xorg logs it's impossible to tell what the problem
is.

> The main problem is here, that the package overwrites the xserver-xorg-nouveau driver and it's hard to be restored, even purging nvidia-driver and reinstalling/reconfiguring xserver-xorg-nouveau. For me, a complete new Debian installation was the solution.

It does not overwrite nouveau, it blacklists it, and that's working as
intended as the proprietary modules and the nouveau modules are mutually
exclusive.

> The package was working earlyer on Linux Mint Sarah, but now breaks both system.
> 
> # Hardware configuration:
> Dell Precision M4600
> with dual-video card:
> * 1x Nvidia Quadro 2000M
> * 1x Intel HD 1000 <-- Not identified by even lspci

I can only find conflicting information online, some say that laptop is
an optimus system, some say it isn't.
You should check your BIOS, make sure it is up to date, and check if
there are optimus or switchable graphics options.

If it is an optimus system, you must install bumblebee-nvidia, and then
the Intel card will be used as the main gpu and you can use the discrete
one via optirun.

https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee

If it is not an optimus system, then it most likely has a switch in the
bios to decide which card to use. Or it could be hardcoded to always use
the nvidia one. In this case it is very much dependent on the specific
hardware.

Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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