Newest upgrade of Debian testing breaks Nvidia & Xorg

[g1annos]

Everything fixed. I did the upgrade without braking the system.

[shmerl]

Yes, fixed at last.

[PAP]

I usually go the easy way, installing nvidia-kernel-dkms and let it install its dependencies. I can confirm it works again. Not sure if the problem is fixed due to the recent (3 days ago, I think) kernel or xorg upgrade, but it works as expected now. Also, a small bug that used to leave artifacts on the screen when maximizing a window vertically is fixed as well.

[odinbaal]

Upgrade worked fine here.

Back to Wheezy (from a remastered dvd) after three weeks with Squeeze.

The question is how do we avoid this recurring in the future? The bug/whatever stopped my productivity for quite some time, and going back to Stable whenever this happens is, to say the least, problematic.

[shmerl]

That's what rolling slice was proposed for, which will be standing between stable and testing, closer to testing, but avoiding this kind of inconsistencies. I.e. it's supposed to be aimed for common / non tech savvy users, who don't want or can't research arcane methods of updating testing, to avoid such breakdowns, and on the other hand prefer newer and more up to date packages in contrast with stable. But I have no idea what state that proposal is, and how things are progressing. Anyone has an idea?

[odinbaal]

This is happening again with the new 3.0.0-1 kernel update for Wheezy...

"Fatal: Module nvidia not found"

and I'm left without X.

Loading the previous kernel is fine, though.

Do you advise waiting for updates to fix this, or remove whatever nvidia drivers and get rid of this very annoying recurrence?

BTW, I have used the nvidia drivers from repo only, and NOT the driver from nvidia's site. I had assumed that this would spare me trouble, but it seems it didn't!

[odinbaal]

Ok.

Removed the following packages:

-------------
libgl1-nvidia-alternatives
libgl1-nvidia-glx
libglx-nvidia-alternatives
nvidia-alternative
nvidia-glx
nvidia-kernel-dkms
nvidia-kernel-source
nvidia-settings
nvidia-vdpau-driver
nvidia-xconfig
xserver-xorg-video-nvidia
-------------

and deleted the xorg.conf file.

Rebooted, and everything works fine with both old and new kernels.

Compiz doesn't work anymore, but that's expected.

Hope this helps others!

[Eck]

I'm hoping absolutely nothing comes of all that "rolling" talk. The system is set up for providing an official distribution and the remainder to provide the means to prepare for the next stable distribution. Ubuntu was created for the impatient and is still there, along with other alternatives (Mint, Linux Mint Debian, etc) for those who enjoy debs and many others for rpm fans.

We've got backports.org officially in the debian archive for available newer packages made for easy installation into stable, debian-multimedia for touchy codec things, and the old building from source is always there for things that for whatever reason haven't found their way into the Debian system. And those are the most rare. Try finding a distro that has anywhere near the software available for easy installation right within the distro archive.

Debian could make better use of those thinking of getting involved in this whole new "rolling" setup by getting them involved in helping the development of the next stable rather than wasting time and resources on something flashy and new that isn't what this distro has ever catered too and never should.

[shmerl]

I hope exactly the opposite. Stable is not intended for modern desktop, it's good for servers. Testing is unusable for average users, who can't and won't break their heads on doing some arcane magic tricks to make it work. Don't judge everyone by yourself. While we, developers and/or tech savvy users can deal with it, most can't, and frustration from such issues will just discourage people from using Linux (Debian at least) altogether. So there is a serious need for desktop slice of Debian which will *not* break out of the blue, like Testing does. So Rolling is important IMO, and will satisfy a need of average desktop user.

Debian claims to be a universal OS? Let it be then. And not a "geek only" OS. And why would anyone complain that Linux is lingering on the desktop behind, if such issues still aren't resolved?

[shmerl]

Looks like the newest dist-upgrade tries to remove nvidia drivers again together with installing a bunch of new xorg packages. I'll stick with apt-get upgrade until the issue is fixed.

[shmerl]

The problem was caused by the fact that Nvidia didn't update legacy drivers to support Xorg server 1.11.0.
See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=641621
And legacy driver is needed since KDE compositing breaks on some older cards with the newest Nvidia drivers... Now users who have those cards are burned on both ends.

[shmerl]

I experimented with sgfxi for the first time, and it's a nice tool for managing nvidia drivers, even easily allows choosing beta drivers. Why isn't it included in Debian repositories though?