Bug#362431: xorg: missing modules

[Joshua Kite <joshuamkite@yahoo.co.uk>]

Dear Daniel

I am sorry if my last post offended you; I had found these difficulties extremely frustrating and on re-reading, it seems that my post was unnecessarily abrasive. I don't really understand what you mean by saying that it's not working BECAUSE I have been trying to use the Nvidia driver. I know that in the past, Debian did not support the nvidia binary drivers and I can well understand this, since they have no 'control' over them. However  two things make this puzzling now: less importantly,  the nvidia-glx packages in non-free (not installable with xorg 7) and more importantly the problems I have encountered with gdm and xorg.conf. Surely something needs to be done to address what are essentially compatibility issues between xorg 6x and xorg 7x caused by different directory structures. At the very least the upgrade needs to address these so that the GPL 'nv' driver can be used 'out of the box' which is not possible at the moment. I recall that the Mozilla Firefox maintainers addressed similar issues in the past by symlinking from the old named components to the new name ones, maybe a similar approach would be helpful here?

Thanks

Joshua

Daniel Stone wrote:

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 04:05:40PM +0100, Joshua Kite wrote:
  

After many, many hours and much reading of forums I have restored my X 
environment although at the moment only with the nv driver, not the 
nvidia driver. The problem is clearly a result of the change in module 
location and package naming with the move from xorg 6.x => xorg 7 and so 
I consider it to be the package maintainers' 'fault' and for them to 
address. Here is what I did:

Firstly I had to generate a 'virgin' new /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

did NOT work (complaining of a customised file) and so I had to

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old.20060417

The new xorg.conf looked very different indeed to the old one based on 
the old xfree86 XF86config-4 from the XF86 => xorg transition.

I still had problems with 'missing' modules which the following 'fixed'

ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/* /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/* /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions

I now found that although I could <startx> manually, I could not get a 
graphical login to come up automatically, gdm complained 'Xserver not 
found...' . I 'fixed' this with

ln -s /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/X11R6/bin/X

I am now back to an (unaccelerated) graphical login: X complains "Failed 
to initialize GLX extension (compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)". 
Naturally I have abandoned the Debian nvidia packages long ago (never 
really used them) and reinstalled the official nvidia 8756 'pkg-run' 
installer several times without further success. I presume that this glx 
problem will also be a location problem as with the rest and that this 
would explain the ubuntu situation which I described previously- the 
kernel loads the nvidia module but x won't use it. I don't have any more 
time to play with his right now but I hope that this sorry situation can 
be fixed by the package maintainers ASAP since it would seem everything 
is there but x is looking in the wrong places for the things it needs 
now that we have moved to xorg 7x.

Thanks especially to Jerome for your help and support
    

I started responding to your post in pieces, but then I realised that
you're using the proprietary NVIDIA driver.  Which explains why it's not
working.

There are numerous documented workarounds for this; please continue
searching (I don't have them to hand), as it is not Debian's problem.