[colug-432] A Perplexing Problem

[Rob Funk]

Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
> First of all, thanks for the reply.  The results of your suggestion are:
> comp at AbNormal:~/Downloads$ glxinfo | grep render
> direct rendering: Yes
>     GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
>     GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
> OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV46
>     GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
>     GL_OES_depth_texture, GL_OES_element_index_uint, GL_OES_fbo_render_mipmap,
> To me this, unfortunately, is a typical message - I have no idea as to the
> meaning.

There are two lines there that matter at the moment: The first one
says you are using direct rendering, which is good. And then a later
line says "on NV46", which indicates an NVidia card.

> The catastrophe to which I made mention was two fold; (1)  the CPU fan failed
> which resulted in overheating and (2) the video card failed and was replaced.
> Unfortunately, the repir tech didn't give me an information about the care, but
> I assume he installed the approp;riate drivers.  I'll check into that.

The fact that the video card was replaced is important here. I
wouldn't assume that a hardware repair tech installed the Linux
drivers, though the Debian install may have taken care of that on its
own to some extent.

One likely possibility is that Debian installed the free drivers,
enough to get the basics working, but Avogadro needs the proprietary
drivers from NVidia.

You may get interesting results from:
  lspci | egrep -i nv\|nouveau|vga
  lsmod | egrep -i nv\|nouveau
  cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | egrep -i nv\|nouveau

Some of those lines could probably be better. But I (intentionally)
don't have any experience with making NVidia cards work. I've long
preferred ATI and Intel video because they're easier to get working
well with free drivers.