Re: Xorg upgrade report (incl. nvidia)
On 4/16/06, Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> 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
>
I noticed that there were still 6.9 packages that would kill the new ones.
>
> 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.
>
>
Again, I also encountered difficulty, I made sure I only installed 1.*
versions and 7.0.11 versions of libraries and the newer protocol and
protocol-dev packages for X.
> 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 fixed font issue by installing x-fonts-base which installed the correct fonts.
> 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
>
>
There are newer versions of Mesa and such to complement the new X
> 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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