Re: Dell Latitude E6410 - Upgrading to Backports Kernel
Hi Rob. Thanks for your reply.
On 26/12/11 23:59, Rob Owens wrote:
I believe that is true.
I've been experimenting with trying to work out how this all works, and
I've come across this for sticking with the proprietary nVidia drivers
(more on that in a moment).
http://www.vultaire.net/blog/2011/08/14/using-nvidia-drivers-on-debian-squeeze-64-bit-with-backported-kernel/
If my understanding is correct, if I install 2.6.39 and necessary
headers from backports and follow this procedure, I should get working
nVidia modules on *both* the new kernel and the stock kernel.
I'd also like to get off the proprietary drivers if I can, however
I'm unsure of the Nouveau route.
I've generally had success with Nouveau. The exception is a couple of
old video chips (one a laptop, the other a desktop). I had to revert to
the nv driver, which worked fine in those cases.
I've spent a few hours this afternoon mucking about with Nouveau trying
to get it working (temporarily at least, just to check). I've had
limited success in some areas and absolutely none in others.
I firstly checked to make sure Nouveau was installed, which it was. I
then killed the X server, backed up xorg.conf and changed the driver for
the video card to "noveau". Followed by an "rmmod nvidia && modprobe
nouveau". This left me with a text console. My machine was docked at the
time, with my 22" LCD connected. The LCD on the laptop was flickery and
the resolution on the LCD was all skeewiff (even in text mode). A
"startx" brought up the desktop as expected, however I couldn't get my
laptop's LCD to work in dual head mode (or at all for that fact) with
xrandr. My external screen worked just fine though.
I then tried the same thing with the machine undocked (just with my
laptop's screen) and had limited success again. I could only get 800x600
resolution, with no way to change it. Trying to get a working X server
at boot (by blacklisting nvidia rather than nouveau in
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-common.conf) was a completely fruitless
effort. The screen was all flickery, and I needed to ssh in from another
box to change everything back and reboot.
So at this stage I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to get Nouveau working
to any acceptable standard. I'm wondering if it is just easier to stick
with the proprietary drivers if there's an easy method to build modules
for the newer kernels but still have the stock ones working should I
need it. (as much as I'd prefer to have the free drivers, if the
non-free ones work I'm not going to complain too much).
That being said if anyone with one of these machines has Nouveau working
and can use a dual screen set up I'd greatly appreciate some mail and
maybe a lend of your xorg.conf.
The other option is rather than going the Squeeze + backports route,
should I merely upgrade my entire machine to Wheezy or even Sid? I
like the stability that Squeeze offers, but there are a few
incompatibilities (lack of touchpad scrolling in particular) which
are beginning to annoy me with the stock Squeeze kernel.
I run Wheezy on a machine that needed it because of this very issue. It
was on a MythTV machine, and I needed the proprietary nVidia driver.
Wheezy runs fine, but the constant updates (or should I say temptation
of updates) is getting annoying. But I like to "set it and forget it"
more than I like getting the latest and greatest.
I like having everything "just work" with updates that are virtually
guaranteed not to break my install. As much as Wheezy or Sid might be
nicer in terms of compatibility with my hardware, there's no point if
it's going to break everything all the time. I ran Squeeze when it was
in Testing and found the need to update every day (and the constant
holding of breath every time I rebooted my machine) to be a bit
annoying. Backports I can live with, but going the Testing/Unstable
route irks me slightly and I'd like to avoid it if I can.
Cheers,
Ashton
--
Ashton Fagg (ashton@fagg.id.au)
Web: http://www.fagg.id.au/~ashton/
Keep calm and call Batman.
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