Home » blogs » MagnusBerg's blog

Etch repository is a mess of kernels and Nvidia drivers

At last I succeeded with my intention to run the latest kernel in the Etch repository and compile the Nvidia driver. It was not easy and I had to take the Nvidia driver from Sid to make it compile without errors. And here comes the story about the mess.

The latest kernel in Etch is 2.6.17-2 but if you chose the meta package 'linux-image-2.6-x' you get a 2.6.16-2 kernel. Don't ask me why!

And the latest Nvidia driver is 1.0.8762+1 but only as binaries and only for the 2.6.16-2 kernel. For the 2.6.17-2 kernel you have to compile it from source. That's fine with me because I'm used to do that. But the source in Etch is nvidia-kernel-legacy-source 1.0.7174-4 and that don't compile. Wherefor I had to get the nvidia-kernel-legacy-source 1.0.7182-1 from Sid.

This makes me wonder how could Debian Etch be such a mess? Don't they now that they doing? This is not that it use to be, and I'm little worried about the future of Debian.

Now I'm happy for my success but angry for the mess. (Laugh here!)

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
0

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Less support for non-free software

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2006-09-14 14:05.

I think there is less support for non-free software in general. Probably the developers are thinking that they should not waste their time on it. Given that nVidia cards seem to be the only ones that work well, it is not the best of situations! I don't understand nVidia's position myself. Afterall, Intel and AMD don't make you use proprietary software in order to use their CPUs. Why can't nVidia just release some source/specs and let people develop drivers for them?

I am using the 8762 nVidia driver with the 2.6.17-2 kernel (on amd64 etch), installed with NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-8762-pkg2.run. I've always been able to install the latest binary as long as I have the kernel headers installed.

Now I see they are up to 8774. Maybe that will work. The good news is that if you find one that works for Etch, you can install it and forget about it, without having to worry about endless kernel updates that happen in unstable.

»

I always use latest from NVidia

Submitted by pinniped on Fri, 2006-09-15 01:00.

I just get the source and object files directly from NVidia - Debian has always had older drivers available via the package system (and this frequently broke because at some time NVidia had a habit of changing the download locations). Also, there have been significant changes in the 2.6.16 kernel so the older drivers will not even compile properly. NVidia might have fixed this by now, but a few months ago you had to locate an "unofficial" patch which was issued by NVidia and which was incredibly difficult to find on their website. Basically you had to find the support post discussing the problem, and that had a link to the patch. I just see this as one of the annoying problems you have to put up with if you want to use NVidia graphics chips.

»

U can check the maintainer

Submitted by bettlebrox on Sun, 2006-10-15 15:29.

U can check the maintainer of the Nvida stuff for Debian's website:

http://people.debian.org/~rdonald/index.php

But, I find that just about everytime I upgraded anything to do with the Nvidia drivers X won't work and I waste an evening or 2 trying to get X up and running again ...

»
Syndicate content