[ale] Fun with Slink!!

[James Sumners]

🙂 Slink is what I started on.

On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 11:40 Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (music)
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