Nouveau blacklisting tool unavailable

[kevjonesin]

Nouveau blacklisting tool (script?) unavailable ...

root@darkstar:~# slapt-get -i xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist
Reading Package Lists...Done
No such package: xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist

???
I'm trying to implement the wiki directions for installing the nvidia driver
http://docs.salixos.org/wiki/How_to_Ins ... DIA_driver
Has the nouveau blacklisting tool been renamed/discontinued?
[btw, I'm using Salix 14.1 XFCE and am fairly new to Salix and the Slack-verse in general.]

Might I safely follow Caitlyn Martin's Slackware directions here ...
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2012/04/so ... -with.html
... and use an 'xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-1.txz' package from somewhere instead of following the Salix instructions that are failing to find the 'xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist' package? If so, where best to obtain 'xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-1.txz' from?

Also, I noticed that Caitlyn's directions offer an extra step (in addition to what's listed on the Salix wiki):

One additional step is needed on Salix OS that is not needed on vanilla Slackware. Salix OS offers automated updates. The updater assumes that the blacklist package is an outdated version of nouveau and will cheerfully offer to replace it with the latest and greatest driver which you can't use. Avoid this problem by editing the /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc file to add ^xf86-video-nouveau to the EXCLUDE= statement in that file.

Is this still applicable to Salix 14.1? If so might it be added to the wiki directions?

[kevjonesin]

p.s.— I've perused: http://forum.salixos.org/viewtopic.php? ... ist#p33424 but haven't succeeded in deriving a clear way to proceed from it.

Tips-n-tidbits would be most welcome. Nouveau doesn't play nice with one of my monitors and I need VDPAU support whenever possible to take some load off my old Pentium 4 CPU. : }

[I've started an online 'intro to python' course and the assosciated vids don't play well/functionally unassisted on my old hardware. On the python note, another post regarding python 2.7, idle, Tkinter, and Salix 14.1 XFCE is likely to follow soon ... ]

[kevjonesin]

Ah, gui to the rescue for a change...
http://en.zimagez.com/zimage/nouveau-pa ... opped0.php
... The blacklisting package has apparently been given the same name* as the driver. DOh!
*['xf86-video-nouveau']

Not sure whether to attempt to install this or not ... thinking not ... seems it might cause internal confusion/inconsistency ... perhaps there's a way to manually download and rename it? ... or if there's a human readable script within perhaps I might extrapolate its meaning ...

hmm, I think unless something becomes obvious I'll wait for the advice of those more experienced ...

[slack631]

These are not the same names
Yuou can install xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-noarch, no problems over that, for shure.

regards

[mimosa]

If you follow the instructions ecactly as in the wiki, it should work. I can't test here because I don't have the Nvidia card.

In particular, the stumbling block you face seems to be the blacklisting package. But it is there:

Code: Select all

sudo slapt-get --search nouveau

In general, if spi behaves unexpectedly, try the underlying tools: slapt-get and slapt-src, to which it is a frontend.

Please let us know either way

Everything should work just the same in Gslapt too, by the way (including the important EXCLUDES step).

EDIT

Regarding the latter, which isn't in the instructions on the wiki, it would be really helpful if you could test to see whether it is actually needed. Soomit that step (just follow the instructions exactly as they stand) and see if the blacklist package gets clobbered. In fact, you don't need to let that happen - if you do

Code: Select all

spi -u && spi -U

after successfully installing your driver, it will tell you what it is about to do, and you can just say no thanks if applicable, and go ahead with the EXCLUDing.

[kevjonesin]

Ah, I see. The actual package (via 'sudo slapt-get --search nouveau') is "xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-noarch-1", not "xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist" as given in the wiki:

Blacklisting nouveau

Run the following as root:

Code: Select all

slapt-get --update
slapt-get -i xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist

Would someone please add the "-noarch-1" suffix to the wiki directions? [Or register me on the wiki and I'll be happy update the entry. I've done a fair bit of 'wikignome' work over at Wikipedia.]*

As I understand it now, it should read:

Blacklisting nouveau

Run the following as root:

Code: Select all

slapt-get --update
slapt-get -i xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-noarch-1

Thanks for the help y'all.

Btw, mimosa, it wasn't an 'spi' issue. The 'slapt-get' command quoted in the original post above is copy/paste straight out of Terminal.

slack631, If you look at the screenshot I posted one can see that 'gslapt' lists both packages as different versions of the same name, with different location entries. However, I now see that they show as distinct in terminal via 'sudo slapt-get --search nouveau'. It was the missing "-noarch" "-1" suffixes that seem to have instigated the confusion.

Just before checking back here I noticed that 'gslapt' does offer an option to downgrade 'xf86-video-nouveau, Version: 1.0.9-i486-2' to 'xf86-video-nouveau, Version: blacklist-noarch-1' but as that would go against the wiki's 'exit all gui stuff advice' I left it alone. I'll make note of the full package name and then make the changes via another tty shell as advised. And I'll check to see if Caitlyn Martin's advice is still relevant.

*ah, I noticed on IRC that mimosa has already offered to update the wiki page.

[mimosa]

There should be no need for the noarch suffix. However, the exclude part (as described by Caitlyn Martin) is needed. It would be great if you could do this. Just ask in irc and someone will hook you up to the wiki.

There's no principle by the way that the wiki can't have instructions for GUI methods. In this case, I think you need to use the command line anyway to install the driver itself, so it's simpler to keep everything there; also no need for (possible) screenshots. The method for adding excluded apckages in Gslapt is very straightforward though - I'd probably do it that way myself rather than edit slapt-getrc.

EDIT

I see I misunderstood what you wrote about the GUI - yes, that sounds right. However, you don't need to to the excluding until before you next do a general upgrade, quite possibly after rebooting.

[kevjonesin]

Ah, after going back and rereading the wiki entry I see that exiting the GUI isn't a concern until just before installing the nVidia driver. So apparently downgrading the Janus-faced beast ... err ... "xf86-video-nouveau" ... via Gslapt would likely be fine. I think I'll just do it all from an alternate tty console anyway just to be safe. I've got an old PIII laptop w/ Vector Light on it handy. I'll bring up the wiki and this forum on that and then dive in to a CLI shell on my present—Salix—box as 'sudo su -l' root.

[kevjonesin]

"Toto, Toto, this don't look like Kansas" ... Uh, after blacklisting the nouveau driver and rebooting (I'm aiming to install an nvidia binary driver) I was unable to bring up a screen on tty1 ('alt+ctl+F1' from 'gdm' greeter). My screens just go blank and suspend. I was able to 'alt+ctl+F7' back to the gdm screen and login to gui just fine. htop in (virtual) terminal window then showed agetty instances for tty(1 - 3) but attempts to access them leads to screen blanking. I had initially started to run the nvidia install script (from 'init 3') but had forgotten to reboot after installing 'xf86-video-nouveau-blacklist-noarch-1'. The nvidia script detected that nouveau was still running and halted with a notification of such and an offer to write to modprobe.d to block nouveau itself. I passed on this option and simply exited the nvidia interface and rebooted (from root console, still in init 3). Came up in the gdm greeter as described before. I've since rebooted again and same behaviour. I'm still getting blanked monitors when attempting to access tty consoles.

I'm disinclined to think that my 'oops' of trying to start the nVidai installer before rebooting after blacklisting nouveau really figures in particularly. The driver installer's dialogs seemed to indicate that it had noticed nouveau and hence halted itself (presumably before writing any changes to anything).

[kevjonesin]

note: I've recently also experienced being unable to access tty consoles when trying to install Manjaro and Solyd X (and may have happened with lubuntu 14.04, don't recall for sure, I've done a helluva' lot of install attempts in the past week). But those distros also were showing other (more blatant) anomalies like hanging on boot and filesystem corruption (which I attributed possibly to systemd as a common denominator). I also have Bodhi 2.4 (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS based distro) on the very same hard drive on another partition and it has been doing fine throughout.

Do 'tty' consoles display via VESA or ... ? How? I'm wondering if something common across many current distros has been 'updated' and is perhaps now not playing nice with my nVidia GeForce 8400 GS pci graphics card.