nvidia p400 on debian jessie [RESOLVED]

[LordByron]

Hi

I've installed debian jessie on a dell workstation 5820 with a nvidia p400 graphics card. After the OS installation the graphics was working, I had a cinamon desktop running, however it was showing a message to say it was running in software rendering mode.

Note - I have to use this version of debian. I appreciate other choices of Linux would solve the problem (it came with ubuntu installed) but that is not an option.

I followed the instructions from this site for installing the nividia drivers

https://linuxconfig.org/nvidia-geforce- ... ux-8-64bit

so basically
apt-update
apt install nvidia-driver (install run without any problem)
apt install nvidia-xconfig
run "nidia-xconfig"

Everything worked exactly as per the instructions but after the reboot I just got a flashing cursor and nothing else.

Out of curiosity I tried removing xorg,.conf file and did a reboot. That gives me a login screen but it dies again when I try to restart cinnamon.

So then after more research I've found this (clearly where I should have started in the first place)
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsD ... 2Jessie.22

The output of nvidia-detect gives me

Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
65:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1cb3] (rev a1)
Uh oh. Your card is not supported by any driver version up to 340.106.
A newer driver may add support for your card.
Newer driver releases may be available in backports, unstable or experimental.

So I have three questions at this point

1) I chose this hardware as it the same as the last workstation that was bought by the previous sys admin. When I run nvidia-detect on that machine it shows a similar card which also isnt supported

root@blah:/etc/X11# nvidia-detect
Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
65:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1cb1] (rev a1)
Uh oh. Your card is not supported by any driver version up to 340.106.
A newer driver may add support for your card.
Newer driver releases may be available in backports, unstable or experimental.

Also it doesnt have any nvidia packages installed.

however it is running the following processes
ps -ef | grep nvidia
root 670 2 0 2018 ? 00:00:47 [nvidia-modeset]
root 23340 2 0 2018 ? 09:19:16 [irq/82-nvidia]
root 23341 2 0 2018 ? 00:00:00 [nvidia]

So my question is, where do I look to figure out precisely how he has things configured so I can try the same approach?

2) It looks very likely that I'm going to back out the nvidia packages and try and put it back to where it was before. The workstation will not be used for anything graphically intensive The section Backing out in case of failure from this article https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsD ... 2Jessie.22 suggests the following steps

apt-get purge nvidia. (don't forget the "." dot) It erases every package with "nvidia" on its name
/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop (gdm3 )
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
killall Xorg
reboot

Xorg should reconfigure itself, if not run a terminal and pass
X -configure

Given the info I have provided, does this look to be the correct course of action? (I'd appreciate some confirmation since I'm following these instruction without a very good understanding of the background and want to avoid digging myself further into a hole rather tham fixing things)

3) Finally - is it really such a bad thing to run the workstation in "software rendering mode" if its not going to be doing anything particularly graphics intensive????

Many thanks

[Head_on_a_Stick]

where do I look to figure out precisely how he has things configured so I can try the same approach?

Check the loaded drivers with

Code: Select all

lspci -k | grep -iA2 'vga\|3d'

The section Backing out in case of failure from this article https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsD ... 2Jessie.22 suggests the following steps

apt-get purge nvidia. (don't forget the "." dot) It erases every package with "nvidia" on its name
/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop (gdm3 )
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
killall Xorg
reboot

Xorg should reconfigure itself, if not run a terminal and pass
X -configure

Given the info I have provided, does this look to be the correct course of action?

Yes, going back to nouveau is probably best if you don't need the extra performance offered by the blobby driver.

Don't bother with configuring X though, that shouldn't be needed at all, just make sure any xorg configuration files for the card are removed (check the xorg log to see what's being parsed).

NVIDIA cards also need non-free firmware so installing firmware-misc-nonfree may fix the sofware rendering problem.

Disclaimer: I don't use NVIDIA.

[stevepusser]

Jessie backports has nvidia-driver 384.130, which is a lot newer than 340!

See backports.org for instructions on how to add that driver--remember to add the non-free section. First upgrade nvidia-detect from backports and run it to see if it will support that card, though.

https://packages.debian.org/jessie-back ... dia-driver

[LordByron]

Thanks a million guys for the feedback.

I installed the nvidia-detect from backports and it reported that the backports nvidia drivers would indeed work.

I installed those an everything worked without any issues.

I didnt need to configure X.