Re: nvidia problems (Sid dist-upgrade)

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 01:12:37 -0600, Damon L. Chesser wrote:

[...]

> How do you install the nvidia installer?  Every time I use it, I have to 
> re-run it at boot time to get it to work.

My guess is that you had the Debian nvidia-* packages installed at some
point. Check if you have these files on your system:

/etc/init.d/nvidia-glx
/etc/init.d/nvidia-kernel

These scripts change the /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
symlink (and probably others) at every boot. To get rid of them you have
to purge nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-common. (Merely removing these
packages is not enough since the boot scripts are considered
configuration files.)

Upgrading xserver-xorg-core will also overwrite nvidia's symlink, unless
you use dpkg-divert to prevent it. The Debian nvidia packages use the
same mechanism to avoid this problem. Some versions of the packages had
a bug and sometimes left the diversions in place after being removed. If
you have problems with upgrading xserver-xorg-core then you should make
sure that you do not see the following diversions:

$ grep -B 2 '^nvidia' /var/lib/dpkg/diversions
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
/usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.a
/usr/lib/nvidia/libGLcore.a.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.a
/usr/lib/nvidia/libglx.a.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
/usr/lib/nvidia/libglx.so.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx
/usr/lib/libGL.so
/usr/lib/nvidia/libGL.so.xlibmesa
nvidia-glx

(i.e. the grep command above should not give you any output.)

-- 
Regards,
          Florian