[ale] Fun with Slink!!

[Charles Shapiro]

Ouch!!!! stretch, I meant STRETCH!


-- CHS

On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 9:37 PM Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bumblebee is way slick! I have a much new $$$ dell xps15 with nvidia and
> Intel. Being able to not run the powerhog just watchin utube vids splaining
> how to screw up a metal lathe is sweet. Then fire up a gpu project with
> cuda code launched from cli and listen to fan ramp up to take off speed :-)
>
> The bee is better than the winders stuff. It's flat powered off in Linux.
> In winders, it trickles power waiting to ramp up fast as an automatic
> overload gpu.
>
> Or I can watch metal shop utube while cashing out with bitcoin mining on
> the gpu.
>
> On December 12, 2018 7:43:33 PM EST, 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
>>
>>
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. All tyopes are thumb related
> and reflect authenticity.
>
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