Debian: Reconfiguring X to new video card

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 02:56:20PM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> I tried to install the debs for the new x server. However, Debian really 
> doesn't like it when you do that. I got a *lot* of packages it wanted to 
> uninstall, which I created a script to reinstall again. It would only reinstall 
> the stuff if I first got rid of the new X server. So I was back to square one. 
> That is, I am relieved to report that I had gotten nowhere rather than 
> backwards.
> 
> Great. Now, Lennart said something about going to www.apt-get.org to download 
> some kind of animal called a "back port". It sounds like an attempt to shoehorn 
> the compatabilities in 4.3 into 4.1. Getting 4.3 is a non-starter, since Debian 
> won't allow it, won't configure it without downloading a bunch of other 
> upgrades such as a later version of libc6 than the one I have. It won't find 
> those packages anyway. If I can add things to 4.1 to make it recognise my card 
> like 4.3 does, then so much the better.

Well a back port is simply taking the source of a package in a newer
debian release, and changing whatever is needed to make it work with an
older debian, and then recompiling it.  This among other things makes it
be compiled with glibc 2.2 rather than 2.3 (which testing and unstable
use).  You can't just install packages from testing or unstable on
stable as you have probably discovered since most things need a newer
libc version.  The backport WILL give you 4.3 with proper dependancies
for woody (along with the minimal set of packages that have to be
upgraded to support the new X version).

> AFAIK, my Debian is current to release 2, and there doesn't seem that there is 
> any way to tell apt-get about the unstable distribution, nor of any intention 
> to upgrade to unstable (I thought all you needed to do was edit sources.list). 
> apt-get update sees the unstable directories added, yet won't recognise it when 
> I tell it to install 4.3.

Unstable has 4.2.1 not 4.3.  experimental has 4.3 (not apt-get'able).

Perhaps this one will do:
deb ftp://linux.upsa.es/pub/XFREE4.3/ ./

I found that on www.apt-get.org by searching for xfree86 packages for
i386.

Note that these will probably NOT work on testing or unstable, so make
sure you did not upgrade the system after running apt-get update with
unstable in your sources.list

> dselect would be nice to use if I could get the 4.3 server listed in its 
> database somehow. It seems to automatically add anything I need to support a 
> package by selecting just the one package.

You can if you add one of the repositories that have 4.3 to your
sources.list, which none of the official repositories have since no
version of debian includes any version of X higher than 4.2.1.  I run
debian unstable on my desktop and I only have 4.2.1, which works fine on
my TNT2 of course (although the nvidia-glx 5328 driver probably would
support just about any nvidia card).

Lennart Sorensen
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