Xorg upgrade report (incl. nvidia)
Hi,
I upgraded my desktop to Xorg 7.0 today, including the proprietary nvidia
drivers. I decided to write it up in this report so that others can get a
better overview of the issues which are involved. (I will of course provide
links to the already existing threads and bug reports when appropriate.)
Briefly, the computer: AMD Athlon XP 1700+, Debian/Sid, custom kernel
compiled from linux-source-2.6.16 (version 2.6.16-1), nVidia GeForce2 MX
(NV11DDR chipset), nvidia driver 1.0-8756. The system was upgraded daily
before the first Xorg 7.0 packages came to Sid.
1) Preparation
Shut down kdm and X. Changed xorg.conf to the nv driver for the graphics
card. Made backup copy of xorg.conf.
2) Upgrade with aptitude
I used aptitude in interactive mode to do a dist-upgrade. Aptitude
proposed to remove "x-window-system" (depreciated metapackage) and
"libxft1" (old Sarge package), which I accepted. After doing the upgrade
there were three broken packages: "mesa-common-dev", "libgl1-mesa-dev"
and "xlibmesa-gl-dev". Without leaving aptitude I did another upgrade
(U,g). This installed more packages and fixed the three broken ones
mentioned above. I had two packages with errors in their postinst
scripts: "x11-common" and "xfonts-nexus". Aptitude did not seem to mind
too much and I did not notice any bad consequences. The x11-common bug
seems to be fixed already:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=362672
3) A little manual help for aptitude
One package was kept from upgrading during step 2: "xlibs-static-dev".
Two old libraries from Xorg were causing the blockade: "xlibs-pic" and
"xlibs-static-pic". I removed them manually and upgraded
xlibs-static-dev. This pulled in three more font-related libraries. I
also removed "x-window-system-core" (depreciated metapackage) and
installed "xorg" to have all loose ends tied up.
4) Getting X to start again (nv driver)
$ echo "xterm -geometry 140x55" > ~/.xinitrc
to have a simple X start-up configuration. "startx" revealed three
problems:
* "Unable to open socket for inet6". I couldn't care less...
* "error opening security policy file /usr/lib/xserver/SecurityPolicy"
The file is now at /etc/X11/xserver/SecurityPolicy, so I created a
symlink:
# mkdir /usr/lib/xserver/
# ln -s /etc/X11/xserver/SecurityPolicy /usr/lib/xserver/SecurityPolicy
* "Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'"
The paths to the font directories have to be updated in xorg.conf.
This does not happen automatically at the moment if you have a
customized xorg.conf. I manually changed the FontPath entries in my
xorg.conf, replacing "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/" with "/usr/share/fonts/X11/".
This was enough to get X working again. I also tried to remove (rename) my
xorg.conf and run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg". This yielded a
working xorg.conf directly. More details are in this thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/04/msg01954.html
I now get the error message 'FreeFontPath: FPE "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.' whenever I start X, but that seems to be
harmless. Everything else is fine according to /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
5) Graphical log-in, mouse cursor
Staring kdm again brought up the graphical log-in without problems. A
minor annoyance was the mouse cursor, which reverted to the ugly black
default theme no matter what I selected with "update-alternatives". I
could fix this by creating the following symlink:
# ln -s /usr/share/icons/crystalwhite /usr/share/icons/default
If you do not want to mess around in the system directory you can fix it
at the user level as is described here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/04/msg01538.html
6) nvidia driver and direct rendering
The only part that was a bit hairy: I ran the nvidia installer script as
provided with version 1.0-8756 of the driver. It completed normally, but
afterwards X would not start when I selected the "nvidia" driver in
xorg.conf. Furthermore, the "nv" driver was suddenly partially broken
(did not find the GLX extension anymore), but at least X still started
with it. It seems that nvidia have not yet adjusted their installer to
the new module directory of Xorg 7.0. Luckily I found an easy fix for
this: I first reinstalled "xserver-xorg-core" to restore the old
libglx.so from Xorg. Then I added the following two ModulePath entries
to the "Files" section of my xorg.conf (the order is important):
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/"
After that the nvidia driver worked, glxinfo (now in the package
"mesa-utils") reported direct rendering, ppracer was as fast as it
should be. If I want to run the "nv" driver I just have to comment out
the first ModulePath (or both of them, since the second one is the
default anyway). Note: The ready-made "nvidia-glx" package is supposed
to work now as well, see this bug report:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354961
All in all it was not too bad. Don't let the gloomy tone in some of the
recent Xorg threads scare you. Happy Beaster everyone!
--
Regards,
Florian
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