[ale] Fun with Slink!!

[James Sumners]

I do not think you upgraded to Slink. Slink is, um, _OLD_.
https://www.debian.org/releases/slink/

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 7:43 PM Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> My Lenovo T530 laptop has been running Debian Wheezy ( 7.0) for, like, 4
> years.  I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Slink (9.0) by
> my traditional method -- back up everything, nuke & pave, and restore what
> I need.  One reason to undertake this was that I need a portable system on
> which I can build opencv binaries.
>
> Everything went pretty ok well, considering. My DVD burner pooped out, so
> I had to install from a stick, but that worked well enough.  Got the wifi
> working after grabbing a hideous proprietary binary blob for it -- not too
> different from my memories of installing Wheezy.
>
> When I bought the machine I sprang for the spiff-a-rino nvidia display
> option.  This put an additional graphics processor in the machine (besides
> the regular intel graphics processor ), which has much better specs but
> also sucks more power. The old solution involved copying a new xorg.conf
> and a modprobe script into appropriate places, then rebooting and manually
> setting the BIOS to the correct value. Kind of a PITA but it worked just
> fine.
>
> Alas, when I installed the (proprietary binary closed source ack blech)
> nvidia drivers for Debian, the default video card stopped working, although
> the nvidia processor worked flawlessly. I fumbled around a bit and found
> that X no longer really, like, *uses* xorg.conf.  There was no obvious way
> to switch between the nvidia driver and the intel one. A dive into lsmod
> and various different library paths convinced me that doing it the old way
> would be a Lot of Work.  The net of a Thousand Lies was curiously silent on
> this matter. There are lots of pages explaining the shell script // reboot
> method for earlier versions of Debian, but nothing on slink.
>
> After a good deal more fumbling around, I finally discovered that this
> trouble has been solved by people much smarter than me.  The bumblebee
> project ( https://www.bumblebee-project.org/ ) is available in the Debian
> repos.  After some _more_ fumbling around (not helped by an errant
> xorg.conf file I left where X could read it), I got it all working, with
> seamless support for nvidia graphics when I want, but stuff not needing it
> running on the power-saving Intel processor.  That is the system I'm using
> to pound out this boastful email.
>
> Poring over log files was really handy here.  In my foolishness and
> confusion, I forgot completely about the xorg.conf file I had accidentally
> generated, and it kept the X server from starting.  But all the appropriate
> kvetches were in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
>
> What fun!
>
> -- CHS
>
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-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (music)
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