Hi, I upgraded my desktop to Xorg 7.0 today, including the proprietary nvidia drivers. I decided to write it up in this report so that others can get a better overview of the issues which are involved. (I will of course provide links to the already existing threads and bug reports when appropriate.)
Briefly, the computer: AMD Athlon XP 1700+, Debian/Sid, custom kernel compiled from linux-source-2.6.16 (version 2.6.16-1), nVidia GeForce2 MX (NV11DDR chipset), nvidia driver 1.0-8756. The system was upgraded daily before the first Xorg 7.0 packages came to Sid. 1) Preparation Shut down kdm and X. Changed xorg.conf to the nv driver for the graphics card. Made backup copy of xorg.conf. 2) Upgrade with aptitude I used aptitude in interactive mode to do a dist-upgrade. Aptitude proposed to remove "x-window-system" (depreciated metapackage) and "libxft1" (old Sarge package), which I accepted. After doing the upgrade there were three broken packages: "mesa-common-dev", "libgl1-mesa-dev" and "xlibmesa-gl-dev". Without leaving aptitude I did another upgrade (U,g). This installed more packages and fixed the three broken ones mentioned above. I had two packages with errors in their postinst scripts: "x11-common" and "xfonts-nexus". Aptitude did not seem to mind too much and I did not notice any bad consequences. The x11-common bug seems to be fixed already: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=362672 3) A little manual help for aptitude One package was kept from upgrading during step 2: "xlibs-static-dev". Two old libraries from Xorg were causing the blockade: "xlibs-pic" and "xlibs-static-pic". I removed them manually and upgraded xlibs-static-dev. This pulled in three more font-related libraries. I also removed "x-window-system-core" (depreciated metapackage) and installed "xorg" to have all loose ends tied up. 4) Getting X to start again (nv driver) $ echo "xterm -geometry 140x55" > ~/.xinitrc to have a simple X start-up configuration. "startx" revealed three problems: * "Unable to open socket for inet6". I couldn't care less... * "error opening security policy file /usr/lib/xserver/SecurityPolicy" The file is now at /etc/X11/xserver/SecurityPolicy, so I created a symlink: # mkdir /usr/lib/xserver/ # ln -s /etc/X11/xserver/SecurityPolicy /usr/lib/xserver/SecurityPolicy * "Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'" The paths to the font directories have to be updated in xorg.conf. This does not happen automatically at the moment if you have a customized xorg.conf. I manually changed the FontPath entries in my xorg.conf, replacing "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/" with "/usr/share/fonts/X11/". This was enough to get X working again. I also tried to remove (rename) my xorg.conf and run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg". This yielded a working xorg.conf directly. More details are in this thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/04/msg01954.html I now get the error message 'FreeFontPath: FPE "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc" refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.' whenever I start X, but that seems to be harmless. Everything else is fine according to /var/log/Xorg.0.log. 5) Graphical log-in, mouse cursor Staring kdm again brought up the graphical log-in without problems. A minor annoyance was the mouse cursor, which reverted to the ugly black default theme no matter what I selected with "update-alternatives". I could fix this by creating the following symlink: # ln -s /usr/share/icons/crystalwhite /usr/share/icons/default If you do not want to mess around in the system directory you can fix it at the user level as is described here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/04/msg01538.html 6) nvidia driver and direct rendering The only part that was a bit hairy: I ran the nvidia installer script as provided with version 1.0-8756 of the driver. It completed normally, but afterwards X would not start when I selected the "nvidia" driver in xorg.conf. Furthermore, the "nv" driver was suddenly partially broken (did not find the GLX extension anymore), but at least X still started with it. It seems that nvidia have not yet adjusted their installer to the new module directory of Xorg 7.0. Luckily I found an easy fix for this: I first reinstalled "xserver-xorg-core" to restore the old libglx.so from Xorg. Then I added the following two ModulePath entries to the "Files" section of my xorg.conf (the order is important): ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/" ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules/" After that the nvidia driver worked, glxinfo (now in the package "mesa-utils") reported direct rendering, ppracer was as fast as it should be. If I want to run the "nv" driver I just have to comment out the first ModulePath (or both of them, since the second one is the default anyway). Note: The ready-made "nvidia-glx" package is supposed to work now as well, see this bug report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354961 All in all it was not too bad. Don't let the gloomy tone in some of the recent Xorg threads scare you. Happy Beaster everyone! -- Regards, Florian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
