Hey folks,

New user of this forum.

To start, it might be best to read my question over at Stack Overflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...g-other-things
but I thought I would try to raise its awareness and duplicate it here, since these forums often have had words of wisdom for these sorts of issues.

Here is a reproduction of the Stack Overflow question:


I am running Debian Wheezy with Nvidia graphics card. Currently after booting up, the GUI doesn't start.

I have already installed nvidia driver:
http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphic...7_.22Wheezy.22
with the proper configuration:
http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#configure

When looking at the suggestions here:
http://linuxquestions.org/questions/...r-post-881164/ someone recommends checking out The results of grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log are:
When researching only one other chap seems to have posted such an issue: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=56478
His solution was not particularly helpful to me. (Perhaps I just don't understand how to apply it, but I'm pretty sure what he did to fix his issue won't fix mine).

I think I can describe how I got into this predicament.

When I run applications in Wine (version 1.4.1), there is no sound (and the test sound doesn't work on the winecfg audio tab). The driver it is using is ALSA, and my audio card is an Asus Xonar STX.

It looks like there is a bug with Wine that doesn't permit sound to work so I tried to install Wine 1.7 with instructions here: http://www.binarytides.com/install-wine-debian-wheezy/ (Scroll down to "Installing latest Wine" section).

Everything is groovy until around
Then I was getting this message: Note the comments of the very page I was reading instructions from has comments about unmet dependencies.

Reading more and more online it looked from cases of Ubuntu users having this issue it had to do with outdated or no longer supported software. Which led me here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...5850932a75041f

Now, this is truly where I think the shit hit the fan.

I followed every instruction given by 0E 800's answer but one: I don't think this /etc/init.d/slim stop command existed, and it certainly doesn't now.

After reboot, my GUI is dead and doesn't start on boot.

So I followed instruction, went into source.list and removed the sid line:
and did an thinking this would sort of revert or re-pull packages. To no avail, and there was some comment about I ran this command, and once complete everything looked to be in order (no messages or issues with apt-get update outside of the norm).

So I rebooted expecting things to be better (how foolish, I know).

Any ideas?

You have completely borked your install.
You can either spend the next several weeks while trying to fix it, learning all about the apt packaging system, debian policies and releases, shared library dependencies, LSB compliant init scripts, systemd init and why it's not a good idea to mix them all up in a big heap.
Or, you can do now what you will end up doing anyway and perform a fresh install, resolve not to follow clueless "guides", and get on with your life.

You will find this link very useful, please read it:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

While this might be true, and your wisdom is appreciated, I don't see myself as that far down the rabbit hole. I was hoping someone could redirect me before I truly have to reinstall - reinstalling is always possible, but I am attempting to avoid that if possible.

Also, I would say the sources I read, and in particular the one that got me into trouble were not clueless, I failed to apply their advice correctly and really I am the clueless one.

For the most part I have followed these rules, but I believe not following http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...5850932a75041f correctly particularly highlights the "Don't Make a FrankenDebian" rule. By trying to download specific packages from Sid, I broke my system seemingly beyond repair.
Thanks for sharing the resource, thought I was not looking for this sort of reply but rather a practical bit on whether I can undo what I've done and the best way to do this.

Once you "upgrade" libc6 it's pretty much past the point of no return.

I totally agree with @descendant_command.

Re-install and next time follow the advice in my link -- it was written by the Debian developers themselves.

Did you tried "apt-get check" and "apt-get -f install" commands? The latter command needs to fix unmet dependencies that found by the first one .

Regarding NVidia drivers, Debian has it's own famous "debian way to nowhere" to install nvidia driver, seems you followed this way.
The only way to get it installed properly is running manufacturer script.

I was originally resistant to reinstalling because I remember my first install took several days- my hard drive is rather large and there is a step that deletes the contents of a drive before installing the base software on it. This deletion is secure and took over 28 hours...

This time around I found cancelling this skipped that step and now install is trivial. I backed up all of my files before-hand and now I'm reinstalling.

Thanks, Heads On a Stick for the link, and to Descendant Command for the terminal diagnosis.

Yep, apt-get -f install didn't have any issues, and I had run this before.

See Head on a Stick's link: it specifically says not to use manufacturer script. Also, I successfully installed nvidia driver the Debian way before hand. That was not the issue.

This is wrong.

Can't say I didn't see this response coming.

This is not wrong

ODD

i just recently installed 7.7
from start with a iso image to running the FIRST update took about 30 minutes

one of the fastest instals i have recently done
Opensuse took about 45 min.
and Sl6 about the same


as to the NVIDIA drivers
unless YOU HAVE been using the .run for YEARS!!!
and i do mean YEARS
use the one in your packagemanager

there are a TON of EXTRA things you HAVE !!!! TO !!!!! DO !!!!! to use the .run
the prebuilt deb or rpm it the BEST way to go for 99% of users

Yes it is.