[NBLUG/talk] Xorg, Debian/Etch, and nVidia... Finally working. :-)

[William Tracy]

Hello,

After getting DSL up, I opted to celebrate by upgrading Debian/Sarge
to Debian/Etch on my box. After doing all the upgrades and restarting,
X.org failed to start. I tried copying a working xorg.conf from an
Ubuntu 5 install on the same machine, and the closest I got to making
it work was "/dev/mice does not exist". I even tried setting up a bare
Sarge install (no X), upgrading to Etch and then installing X, with no
luck.

I finally broke down and burned an Etch install disk, and paved over
my install again. That worked, finally. :-) Then, I discovered that I
couldn't get nVidia's drivers to install. Their shiny new
reconfiguration utility rewrote my xorg.conf file correctly, but xorg
whined that it couldn't load nvidia and therefore couldn't load glx.

One web site suggested installing xserver-xorg-dev, and reinstalling
the nvidia driver. No luck. Then I finally found this entry on the
Debian Wiki:

http://wiki.debian.org/Xorg69To7#head-6487522167fb024609e6b3cdf5f25a2969697fff

I reinstalled the driver per that advice, and now (finally!) all seems
to be well.

The new Debian installer didn't grab KDE, so right now I just have
Gnome. I don't see a whole lot of changes to Gnome (other than that it
took me a few minutes to get session management turned on again), but
there's now a GUI utility that checks for system updates, like Ubuntu
has. Cool! :-)

BTW, I nuked my Slackware install. For the life of me, I could not
find an easy way to configure networking without completely
reinstalling the OS. Yuck. I just burned a Vector Linux disk, so maybe
I'll install that and see if it redeems Slackware. :-)

Anyway, I hope my ramblings might help someone out somewhere.

William