What package(s) are needed to install nvidia support ?

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, James Gregory wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 07:21 +0200, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, James Gregory wrote:
>
> > > Just on this, I expected that installing the packages would alter my X
> > > config, like the livna packages for fedora. I was quite surprised when I
> > > had to edit my X configuration (I was unaware that using the reconfigure
> > > script would do that for me). I think the expectation for Joe User would
> > > be that installing drivers makes the hardware work straight away.
> >
> > You will have to use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86. Automaticaly
> > altering X config is not a good idea at all. The is only one case over
> > several in which i can do it, and hounestly it is more trouble than joy.
>
> Why do you believe that altering X config is a bad thing?

Several reasons:

1) the config is complex. a simple sed will not work.
2) if you manually changed the config i can't change it.
3) the config file belongs to another package that means duplicating all
   the code to handle that config file into another package and keep them
   in sync. plus it is not nice that package foo modifies package bar
   configuration. That means introducing a question to ask the user.
4) it adds another point of failure in the installation system.
5) the nvidia commercial drivers is not 100% configuration compatible with
   the nv free driver. Speaking for my experience on my systems the nv
   free driver can go to a higher resolution than the the commercial one.
   This means that the behaviour of X will change and that's not what the
   user expects.

> Is it that you think it shouldn't be loaded upon installation or that
> performing this loading is likely to cause other headaches?

It can and did cause headaches. The nvidia driver is splitted into kernel
and userland module. First of all loading the kernel module will alter the
kernel status (and it is known that was giving problems. see LKML for it).
Second we don't want the machine to crash or start behaving weird due to a
module that we have no sources and that we cannot fix. The user has to be
conscious to do it at his own risk.

Fabio

-- 
<user> fajita: step one
<fajita> Whatever the problem, step one is always to look in the error log.
<user> fajita: step two
<fajita> When in danger or in doubt, step two is to scream and shout.