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

[John]

Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> John wrote:
>
>> I am trying the role of user's advocate. I don't claim any particular 
>> coding skills; those I once had are sadly attrophied and/or 
>> inapplicable.
>>
>> The suggestion that someone with ideas should code them is often used 
>> as a pretty sad putdown, it shows a lack of respect and can be hurtful.
>>
>> If you want a product that is commercially viable, then it has to 
>> allow users to get on with their work, not researching endless howtos 
>> and reading code. I have some thoughts on that, but not the skills to 
>> do the work.
>
>
> We couldn't agree more. Making Ubuntu a pleasure for typical 
> non-expert users is a key goal of the project, and you've already 
> helped us take several steps towards that goal, for which I'm 
> grateful. But if you're going to play advocate, please remember that 
> not having the skills to implement a proposed solution usually also 
> means not having the skills to decide which implementation is better.
>

That does not follow: not being a competent C, Perl or Python programmer 
does not mean one cannot program well in other languages such as COBOL 
(not my forte either, but I've worked with a lot of people who were very 
good at it), PL/1 (used to implement MULTICS), PL/S & PL/X (IBM systems 
programming languages) or many others not common in *x environments.

You don't evem have to be much of a programmer to comprehend that if you 
have a plan that will fail in some circumstances then an alternative is 
highly desirable, and that it be easily implemented.

In Debian, there is no easy way to boot to a multiuser environment 
without running {x,g,k}dm if installed. In other distros, you can do 
that. make any necessary repairs and then you only need to start the 
display manager.

An implementation would be a visible grub menu that enables booting to 
such an environment by choosing it off the grub menu. It does not have 
to use runlevels, but it could. As an alternative to runlevels, it could 
set an envronment variable to inhibit starting the graphics environment, 
or to choose (via init scripts) to run a text-based menu to choose what 
to do. Choices might include login at VCs, video reconfiguration, 
display-manager selection.

I don't care a lot about _how_ its implemented, my concern is that it be 
as easy as possible for a naive user to use. Generally, that means menus.