Re: Attempt to use the chipset NVIDIA Corp MCP79 [GeForce 8200M G] (rev b1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) with Dix. Teacher-Guide, Mr. Felix Miata
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 07:38:45PM +0530, Susmita/Rajib wrote:
> One question, as I am having cold feet, expecting heartbreak.
>
> Does nouveau boot into GUI before purging the driver with any of the three:
You're confused. Let's go back to basics.
When your system is powered on, the first thing that happens is your
firmware (sometimes called "BIOS" although that's not accurate on modern
systems) runs through a bunch of initializations and tests, and locates
some of your devices. Then it looks for a boot loader on one of those
devices.
Next, the boot loader takes over. On a typical PC (amd64 or i386),
with a typical Debian install, that boot loader is GRUB. GRUB reads
a menu from a file on one of your devices, and this file tells it
where to find a Linux kernel, or other operating systems. It also has
a list of parameters that it can pass to Linux, to tell it certain
things.
GRUB loads Linux (or whatever OS you choose). Linux runs through its
own battery of hardware probing and initializations. After it's done
with that, it runs /sbin/init (unless told otherwise by GRUB's parameters).
On a standard modern Debian installation, /sbin/init is a symlink to
systemd, so systemd takes over as the "user space" (not part of the
kernel) process, and then eventually spawns every other program that
it has been configured to run.
systemd is quite complex, so I'll only cover one very specific part of
it here: it has something called a "default target", which tells it which
programs to start up. There are two different common default targets
for systemd:
graphical.target
multi-user.target
If the default target is graphical.target, AND if a Display Manager
package is installed (e.g. gdm3 or lightdm), then a GUI will run at
boot time.
If the default target is multi-user.target, OR if no Display Manager
package is installed, OR if various configuration files are changed to
tell systemd not to load a Display Manager at boot time... then no GUI
is run at boot time. You get a standard Linux text console.
> apt purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
> apt-get purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
> aptitude purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
>
> I am sorry for the misinformation posted earlier.
>
> Nouveau always has drawn a GUI, but then the system froze. If that is
> your experience too, then I should be elated.
Nouveau does not "draw a GUI". I think you are confusing what Nouveau
*is*.
Nouveau is the name of one of the possible drivers for the Nvidia
graphics chipsets. If you start an X or Wayland session, the X server
or the Wayland thingamabobber will need to load drivers to talk to
your graphics hardware. If your graphics hardware is Nvidia, then it
might use the nouveau driver. Or some other driver.
If you are having trouble getting X or Wayland to start up, the first
thing you want to do is disable the automatic starting of X or Wayland
at boot time. You can do that by changing the boot parameters that
GRUB sends to Linux (either one time, or permanently), or by permanently
changing systemd's default target, or by editing some config file whose
name I can't find right now, or by removing your Display Manager package.
Any ONE of those actions will be sufficient.
Once you fix your driver and/or firmware issues, so that "startx" works
(or so that Wayland works, if you're doing that), then you can revert
your action and allow the Display Manager to run at boot time.
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