<div><div dir="auto">if it makes you feel any better, nvidia optimus is a dumpster fire on windows and mac as well.</div></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 8:20 PM James Sumners via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">I do not think you upgraded to Slink. Slink is, um, _OLD_. <a href="https://www.debian.org/releases/slink/" target="_blank">https://www.debian.org/releases/slink/</a></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 7:43 PM Charles Shapiro via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>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.<br></div><div><br></div><div>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.<br></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.<br></div><div><br></div><div>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 ( <a href="https://www.bumblebee-project.org/" target="_blank">https://www.bumblebee-project.org/</a> ) 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.<br></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>What fun!</div><div><br></div><div>-- CHS</div><div><br></div></div></div></div>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="m_8365264409637038693gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">James Sumners<br><a href="http://james.sumners.info/" target="_blank">http://james.sumners.info/</a> (technical profile)<br><a href="http://jrfom.com/" target="_blank">http://jrfom.com/</a> (personal site)<br><a href="http://haplo.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">http://haplo.bandcamp.com/</a> (music)</div>
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</blockquote></div></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Sent from my mobile. Please excuse the brevity, spelling, and punctuation.</div>