this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Noob stumbling along. Just looking for some guidance on adding a module to initramfs. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Running Bookworm, Plasma DE if that's relevant.

Background: I'm learning here. Decent amount of coding and embedded hardware experience but I'm usually missing one or two key concepts with this stuff.

Getting a box running, and wrestling with NVIDIA drivers. I successfully installed the driver (I think), but now lightdm isn't working. From what I read it appears there's a common issue around a race condition where lightdm tries to fire up before the drivers ready, so I need to add the nvidia driver to initramfs.

Can anyone give me some pointers? Specifically while I get the above:

  1. I'm not sure what modules need to be added and if they're named something specific for debian vs other distros
  2. The correct file to modify
  3. The correct format/syntax that needs to be added

I've found lots of examples, just none specific to debian, and screwing around at this level I don't want to bork something enough I need to do a bare install.

Thanks for any help!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It would be useful to get some more info.

  1. how did you install the drivers?

  2. what do you mean by lightdm doesn't work?

  3. can you get some logs from a terminal? Like journalctl -xe? If your gui isnt coming up you could get these from tty1 by using ctrl+alt+f1.

I haven't used nvidia in a long time but use debian daily. I'd expect if you installed the drivers using a supported method it would do stuff like initramfs etc automatically if required.

I'm sure you already found this but just in case here is the official documentation; https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

for posterity: I don't think that was it (although it does seem to be a common issue especially when you have an SSD). I never did try initramfs modification (not correctly anyway, I don't think).

Problem was resolved by purging nvidia, and installing the driver manually. There also appears to be an issue with the secure boot signature, so for the time being I addressed it by disabling secure boot. Another day's problem. edit: so it was likely never a race condition issue, it was likely secure boot rejecting the keys. It should be easily resolvable, even if I need to purge again, reinstall, and put the key in the proper place, but I'm ok for now given whats on this machine, what it has access to, and other shit I have to do.

edit: I forgot, I confirmed that the system is, infact properly utelizing the driver to get the most out of the card.