Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
One way of doing this is to go to the Nvidia website and download the latest file from the relevant page on there. Then, the next stage is to restart your PC and choose rescue mode instead of the more usual graphical option. This drops you onto a command shell that is requesting your root password. Once this is done, you can move onto the next stage of the exercise. Migrate to the directory where the *.run file is located and issuing a command similar to the following:
bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.40.run
The above was the latest file available at the time of writing so the name may have changed by the time that you read this. If the executable asks to modify your X configuration file, I believe that the best course is to let it do that. Editing it yourself or running nvidia-xconfig are alternative approaches if you so prefer.
Proprietary Nvidia drivers are included the repositories for Linux Mint Debian Edition so that may be a better course of action since you will get updates through normal system update channels. Then, the course of action is to start by issuing the following installation comands:
sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-common
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo apt-get install kernel-source-NVIDIA
sudo apt-get install nvidia-xconfig
Once those have completed, issuing the following in turn will complete the job ahead of a reboot:
sudo m-a a-i nvidia
sudo modprobe nvidia
sudo nvidia-xconfig
If you reboot before running the above like I did, you will get a black screen with a flashing cursor instead of a full desktop because X failed to load. Then, the remedy is to reboot the machine and choose the rescue mode option, provide the root password and issue the three commands (at this point, the sudo prefix can be dropped because it’s unneeded) then. Another reboot will see order restored and the new driver in place. Running the following at that point will do a check on things as will be the general appearance of everything:
glxinfo | grep render
Over the course of a year, I end up visiting Ireland a few times so I decided to invest in a Meteor PAYG broadband stick to see how I’d get on with it. For €20, your can get a 30-day pass with 7.5 GB downloading capacity, a more generous offer than you’d get with some UK mobile networks (T-Mobile really come to mind here). Signal strength was strong wherever I tried it too with 3G being available so long as you are in the right place with EDGE being the lowest that I got otherwise. Download speeds are good too so it turned out to be a good investment of €30 to get the Huawei E173 USB dongle (I had a T-Mobile one of these before and it no longer works so I am keeping an eye on reliability with this one; the design seems a little different and I am getting OK so far) and €20 of credit that comes with it. After all, anything’s better than the punitive roaming rates that UK providers charge.
There are packages absent from the Arch Linux repositories that could come in useful. When you are after one of these, then it’s time to search the Arch User Repository (AUR). In here, I have found the likes of Microsoft Core Fonts, Adobe Reader and Dropbox. There may be others but these examples are what comes to mind as I write this. In time, it may be that packages make if from the AUR into the Arch community repository but you have to use the former if you cannot wait.
Just search the AUR for what you want and download the tarball (tar.gz file) from the webpage where you find it. Then, I recommend extracting it to /tmp where clearance at boot time means that you don’t need to do it yourself. Then, going into the appropriate subfolder in /tmp (acroread for Adobe Reader, for instance) and issue the following command:
makepkg
This will attempt to create a package file where you are working for installation by pacman. If dependencies are absent, you will be told and these may need another AUR search in some cases though most are included in the repositories. Once dependencies, have been sorted, just issue the makepkg command again to create the xz file that pacman needs to perform the installation. To do so, issue the following command from the same directory either as root or by using sudo if your user account has such privileges:
pacman -U *.xz
There usually is but one xz archive in a package folder so I have been taking the easy route of not looking up the name all of the time. Of course, you can do that for safety if you want.
With pacman not looking at the AUR, you have to do more work to get upgrades to happen if you want to avoid without having to repeat the above process all of the time. There is a package in the AUR called yaourt that needs package-query from the same place as well. Before any of these, yajl needs to installed from one of the default repositories. Once yaourt is in place, then the following does the updates for you:
yaourt -Syu --aur
Again, it might be best run this as root or using sudo though that gives messages from makepkg about not running it as a privileged user. However, I reckon that those might need to be ignored. When I tried it, the Citrix update failed though the Dropbox one succeeded. This experience might be worth bearing in mind. Saying that, I have found installing and updating software from the AUR not to be too onerous a process so far. Anything that gives a little more freedom only can be a good thing.