nvidia-driver 390.84 Installed on Stable

[Josh Blagden]

Hi folks,

    I'd like to let you know that after a week of struggling and then an
hour in IRC, I finally got nvidia-driver 390.84 installed on a fresh
installation of Debian 9 Stable. But it took a lot of coaching from
folks in the Debian IRC channel. The experience was far from seamless or
smooth. For starters, I had to install the headers for the version of
the kernel that was I have on my system. Debian Stable comes with kernel
version 4.9, but the Linux headers which were automatically installed
were for kernel version 4.16

Here's what I had to do to get nvidia-driver 390.48 working on my PC:

1. Fix broken apt packages (which might only have been necessary because
I originally didn't have the non-free backports repositories in
sources.list).

2. Create a new Xorg config file containing the following: 'Section
"Device"\n\tIdentifier "My GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection'

3. Reboot to a black screen. Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal.

4. Install the Linux headers for the 4.9 kernel installed on my system.

5. Reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms



With the exception of the non-free backports repositories, I think a lot
of my struggling could have been avoided if nvidia-driver did the following:

            1. Checked to see if there were any broken packages, and if
            there were any fixed them

            2. Made the xorg config file
            containing the following: 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier
            "My GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection'

            3. Checked to see if the the right Linux headers were
            installed and if necessary, installed the correct headers

            3b. If the correct headers had to be installed,  ran
            dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms, and

            4. Rebooted (with the user's permission, of course)

I know I might be asking a lot of you, but these modifications would
make the nvidia-driver installation seamless. I was nearly ready to go
back to either Ubuntu or Mac just to get this GPU working, but I stuck
with it because I prefer Debian for a variety of reasons. Setting up a
new GPU should be as simple as plugging in the GPU, booting up,
installing nvidia-driver and rebooting. It really shouldn't take a week
to get a new GPU up and running.



Admittedly, I feel a little dumb because I originally only added the
backports repository without also adding the non-free backports
repositories. I was panicking too much to realize that mistake. I might
talk to the folks who maintain the backports instructions, to see if
they'll add a non-free section.




Thank you for your time and (hopefully) future efforts,
                                                        Josh Blagden



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-nvidia-devel/attachments/20180613/abc5a50f/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 874 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-nvidia-devel/attachments/20180613/abc5a50f/attachment.sig>