or: A fun day in the lab. Experiences and observations sprinkled with sarcasm. A followup thread to Graphics Card Overview
…
I just bought a new printer … ahem … graphics card¹.
It is neither cutting edge, nor is the computer² it is being put into nor is the operating system³ used.
I follow a reasonable crossover and order of instructions from asus — can someone release those poor souls of bios coders out of their misery, please? — and debian — they try really hard to provide all the stuff they can, you can feel the effort and the pain – and nvidia and what do I get?
Black screen
Monitor saying “Out of range”
Luckily the machine has an internal graphics card and I have a second monitor so I can start debugging. Next up:
Xorg gets killed so badly that the OS boots into the terminal prompt only
After some Xorg -configure (on the rescue monitor) and vim action the system has a working GUI again and now I have something never seen before:
The screen connected to the GPU is black and I can move the mouse cursor there with the simple big black Xorg-X cursor.
And that’s it. At that point I decided to watch “The Minions” with my wife because that seemed like way more fun. And it was.
Next try won’t be for at least a week, got other projects to do.
For the meantime I reverted back to the old setup with two monitors connected.
At least that went without a hitch.
Current verdict: graphic cards are the new printers.
Drivers exist but install is wonky.
How 1999.
¹) MSI Geforce GT 1030
²) Asus H270 plus with i7-6700
³) BunsenLabs Beryllium, which is debian bullseye with openbox
After an intermediate quick test from a live system looked promising I kept the card but had to postpone any further investigations to “later”.
Fresh system (Bunsenlabs Boron) installed and the Nvidia driver installed, too.
Well, after I installed it and purged the install once before.
By now I am used to “edgy” technology not working in a reliable way.
For reference here is the apt command that pulls all the required dependencies - which seems to work because my card (GT1030) is supported by the default nvidia-driver package in debian.
_$ sudo apt install nvidia-opencl-icd
clinfo finds the card, darktable-cltest finds the card.
