Installing Nvidia Drivers Debian Testing

[kdonca]

As the title says I am trying to install the Nvidia drivers in Debian testing non free KDE and it isn't going well.

What I have done so far"
Install throught he Debian KDE Discover software manager
Install with apt (apt install nvidia-driver nvidia-xconfig nvidia-settings)
Both of those way tell me to run nvidia-xconfig as root.
When I do that it says the file can't be located/opened (which from my understanding is because it doesn't exit yet) and then it creates it. I reboot my system and I am brought to tty1. I have tried restarting sddm and get no response.

I have tried installing the way of the Debian wiki but get only failures there too. Which is because I try running the commands but following the wiki but it is directed at stretch not testing.

I realize I am probably missing something or doing something very stupid which is causing the problem.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I have tried installing the way of the Debian wiki but get only failures there too. Which is because I try running the commands but following the wiki but it is directed at stretch not testing.

That method should work, you should tell us *exactly* what you tried (and post any errors messages here in full) so we can see where you went wrong.

I do not recommend using the nvidia-xconfig package, the sample Xorg configuration file given in the Debian wiki page should work just fine.

[kdonca]

A little more information:
Laptop is a Dell G7 15
Card is an GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
According to this link I need the version 390.48
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L ... chips.html

so I added stretch-backports to my sources then ran the command to install kernel headers

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#sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's/[^-]*-[^-]*-//')]

Then did apt update and install

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#sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install -t stretch-backports nvidia-driver 

Rebooted
Went to the wiki section for config and did the steps for manual config.

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#sudo  mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
# sudo echo -e 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier "My GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection' > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf

When I run

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# mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
# sudo echo -e 'Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier "My GPU"\n\tDriver "nvidia"\nEndSection' > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf

I get "bash: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf: Permission denied"

So I went in with nano and edited the -nvidia.conf file to match what is in the wiki
Section "Device"
Identifier "My GPU"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection

I restart and on rebooting it brings me to the tty1 prompt. I try to restart sddm with "sudo systemctl restart sddm" and nothing happens. I get no error messages and do not know where to look for log files with them.

Regardless of if I use Discover or if I use the method in the Debian Wiki I get the same result.

[stevepusser]

Isn't that an i7-8750H Optimus laptop with Intel UHD630 iGPU and a discrete Nvidia 1060? Most users try and run Bumblebee on Debian to use the Nvidia card for 3D rendering in the background. Just installing Nvidia drivers usually does not work, unless you can turn off the Intel GPU in the BIOS and can live with the lower battery life and heat produced by the Nvidia card.

If you're running Debian testing, do not use stretch-backports, since those are just Debian testing packages with the version lowered a bit, and they also may not be compatible with Buster. You just need to add the contrib and non-free section to the "buster" repo URL in your sources.list file.

FWIW, I have a MSI laptop with similar hardware working well on a Stretch-based distro with backported packages:

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System:    Host: mxmsileopard Kernel: 4.18.0-19.2-liquorix-amd64 x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc 
           v: 6.3.0 Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3 Distro: MX-17.1_x64 Horizon March 14  2018 
           base: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: Micro-Star product: GP63 Leopard 8RD v: REV:1.0 serial: <filter> 
           Mobo: Micro-Star model: MS-16P6 v: REV:1.0 serial: <filter> UEFI: American Megatrends 
           v: E16P6IWS.106 date: 04/08/2018 
Battery:   ID-1: BAT1 charge: 41.6 Wh condition: 42.7/53.4 Wh (80%) model: MSI Corp. MS-16P6 
           status: Unknown 
           Device-1: hidpp_battery_0 model: Logitech Wireless Mouse M525 charge: Full 
           status: Discharging 
CPU:       Topology: 6-Core model: Intel Core i7-8750H bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Kaby Lake 
           rev: A L2 cache: 9216 KiB 
           flags: lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 52992 
           Speed: 2133 MHz min/max: 800/2200 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 2133 2: 1958 3: 1868 
           4: 1807 5: 2014 6: 1823 7: 1855 8: 2433 9: 1826 10: 1795 11: 2005 12: 1749 
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 630 driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile] driver: N/A bus ID: 01:00.0 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: intel resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel UHD Graphics 630 (Coffeelake 3x8 GT2) 
           v: 4.5 Mesa 18.1.7 direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: Intel Cannon Lake PCH cAVS driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 00:1f.3 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k4.18.0-19.2-liquorix-amd64 
Network:   Device-1: Intel Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] driver: iwlwifi v: kernel port: 5000 
           bus ID: 00:14.3 
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter> 
           Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2400 Gigabit Ethernet driver: alx v: kernel 
           port: 3000 bus ID: 02:00.0 
           IF: eth0 state: down mac: <filter> 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 1.14 TiB used: 531.97 GiB (45.5%) 
           ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Micron model: 1100 MTFDDAV256TBN size: 238.47 GiB 
           ID-2: /dev/sdb vendor: HGST (Hitachi) model: HTS721010A9E630 size: 931.51 GiB 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 111.56 GiB used: 59.04 GiB (52.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda5 
           ID-2: /home size: 832.35 GiB used: 472.90 GiB (56.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb1 
           ID-3: swap-1 size: 16.40 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sdb3 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 57.0 C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:      Processes: 343 Uptime: 2h 48m Memory: 15.52 GiB used: 2.66 GiB (17.2%) Init: SysVinit 
           runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 6.3.0 Shell: bash v: 4.4.12 inxi: 3.0.25 

Bumble working to switch to the Nvidia card:

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$ optirun inxi -G
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 630 driver: i915 v: kernel 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile] driver: nvidia v: 390.87 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: intel resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.87 

[kdonca]

Yes those specs are correct.

I had read that bumblebee was not being developed anymore/the nvidia drivers were the way to go.

Also good to know about Stretch. I will remove it from my sources. I am new to testing and Debian proper. I have been using Ubuntu up until today.

I guess I will give Bumblebee a shot regardless of what I read. Thanks.

[stevepusser]

Yes those specs are correct.

I had read that bumblebee was not being developed anymore/the nvidia drivers were the way to go.

Also good to know about Stretch. I will remove it from my sources. I am new to testing and Debian proper. I have been using Ubuntu up until today.

You also need firmware-misc-nonfree from the non-free section for your hardware to work correctly.

Bumblebee is working fine for me on similar hardware, but who knows if Dell has some quirks in their BIOS. It took me some months to get mine to work, but I added a few lines to a configuration file for Bumblebee, and that got it working. But I had also previously added virtualgl and virtualgl-libs:i386 from the MX Linux repo, and am too chicken to remove those to see if those were also part of the solution, now that it's finally working. Virtualgl has the glxspheres(64) program, which is superior to the glxgears applet for benchmarking.

Anyway, with the Intel card controlling the display, adding an xorg.conf file telling your system that, no, the Nvidia card is, results in a black screen.

[kdonca]

I just want to run a few games on steam and Davinci Resolve (assuming it will run). If Bumblebee gets me there then that is fine with me.

Anyways tomorrow I will get a shot and see what I can get working. Thank you for your help.

[stevepusser]

Yes, for 32-bit applications and games in Steam or Wine, on a 64-bit system you must enable i386 multiarch and then also install :i386 versions of graphic driver libraries. The Debian wiki entry for Steam explains these. You probably also want to install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc and libtxc-dxtn-s2tc:I386, since many games require this texture compression library and will throw a cryptic error message if they can't find it.