After doing a Linux kernel upgrade, I have to recompile my hacked Acer driver to activate wifi on the Medion MD40100 portable; furthermore, I have also to recompile the nVidia driver too. When doing this, I download always the latest available version from nvidia.com.

So last night, I downloaded and installed the new nvidia linux driver (8762). After installation everything was working fine. But after rebooting twice, X failed to load with a connection reset problem (error 104). In the log file following line was displayed :

(EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)

After a fair amount of time looking into it, I re-installed the driver and saw that it displayed "Removing NVIDIA TLS links...done" during reboot cycle.

I looked through the nvidia-glx script in /etc/init.d and found the line. It removes some symbolic links for OpenGl and the actual nVidia driver during reboot. The reason why ? I still don't know. There were two options, or commenting out the lines which remove the symlinks, or the perform a complete removal (including configuration settings) of the package 'nvidia-glx-legacy'. Since I am currently using the installer provided by nVidia itself, I have chosen to for the last option, which removes the nvidia-glx directory in /etc/init.d/, resulting in a working X environment and a loaded nVidia driver after each reboot.

Hopes this will help some other people strugling with the same problem.

By the way, in fact there two ways of installing nVidia drivers on a Debian system.

the official installer from nVidia, or
the Debian driver package

Currently I am using the first option, however on the long run, I assume the last option is the best one. But still I am looking for a good and detailed explanation on how this should be done !

Some extra detailed information about the 2 possibilities can be found the next page (#2).

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