[ale] Fun with Slink!!

[Charles Shapiro]

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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