nVidia TLS silent killer

[Adam Hardy <adam.ant@cyberspaceroad.com>]

I had abject problems with the nVidia non-free driver over the last 10 days but
I think I finally have sorted them out now - almost.

I can't use "nv" because my Java IDE started crashing on a frequent basis, so I
decided to install and compile the non-free packaged driver.

This was a story in itself, and after getting that sorted, I thought I'd be OK,
but I guess it built up a lethal mixture on my system of old drivers and modules
- suffice it to say I had kernel 2.6.26 from backports and I had to ditch that,
and I had used nvidia-installer from nvidia.com and had ditched that, following
some instructions on the net which left the non-free package uninstallable, so
my system's not exactly pristine, but it's back in a state where everything
appears OK.

So after compiling and configuring nvidia-glx, I'd get xorg up and running with
the Driver "nvidia" in xorg.conf, but each reboot led back to xorg failing to start.

I followed the latest wikis and install instructions and still, each reboot
killed it. I couldn't find any reference to a similar problem with a solution
that helped, and the logs on my system reported no errors - all fine and dandy
and then EOF.

I've used dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg so often I've memorised the key strokes.
I also used nvidia-xconfig. I've played around with lspci and lsmod and
"modprobe -r" and mesa-utils and all that jazz trying to figure out my issue.

What finally sorted it out for me was /etc/default/nvidia-glx - I really wish
I'd seen that sooner.

Now I can use xorg with the nVidia driver if I boot to a CL and then run

sudo /etc/init.d/nvidia-glx stop
sudo /etc/init.d/nvidia-glx start
startx

with the /etc/default/nvidia-glx USE_TLS=1 setting.

I guess I'm ranting, but does anyone know what I can do to fix this last thing?

Thanks
Adam

ps what is Thread Local Storage?