Nanacore: GPU support addendum

UPDATE 2012-11-30: The problem described in this post no longer applies since yesterday 2012-11-29, as the ia32-libs* multiarch transitionals have finally landed in Testing. Installing libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 after previously installing the rest of the NVIDIA stack from Experimental appears to work flawlessly.

From my previous post:

Quite notably, everything is working fine with the latest Debian wheezy packages (although I compiled my own newer kernel later anyway) except for the onboard sound controller.

Ah! But not so fast! I had forgotten that Debian wheezy’s half-baked multiarch support has serious implications for 32-bit OpenGL-based software on the amd64 platform (a.k.a. x86_64 for everyone else), regardless of whether one is using a proprietary (e.g. NVIDIA) or free (Mesa) stack. In Reicore’s (Mesa) case, this meant that I had to stick to the version from ia32-libs in Testing, which is Mesa 7.7.1 — contrast with the native version, which is 8.0.4.

In Nanacore’s case, the implications span even more packages. The description of the libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32 package in Testing (amd64 arch) says:

This is an empty transitional package to aid switching to multiarch.

Run the following commands to install the multiarch library:

  • dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; apt-get update
  • apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386

And, surprise, surprise. That doesn’t work in Testing because of bug #686033 — fortunately for me, apt-get was wiser in blocking the operation due to some perceived conflicts.

In an attempt to solve this, I pulled the NVIDIA driver packages from Unstable and then tried to install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 again to no avail — it requires me to upgrade ia32-libs from the version in Testing to the one in Unstable, which is really a multiarch transition metapackage. After watching multiarch in Debian wheezy become such a major disappointment over time, I decided to do something different with libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386.

I decided to install it by hand.

The procedure was a little convoluted and involved a lot of symbolic links, and I’m not completely sure whether what I did works because I don’t have Wine installed right now and I don’t really want to install Debian’s packages because—again—they use multiarch support to pull nearly 92 MiB worth of redundant crap:

shadowm@nanacore:~$ sudo apt-get install wine
[sudo] password for shadowm:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  gcc-4.7-base:i386 libasound2:i386 libc6:i386 libc6-i686:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386 libdrm-radeon1:i386
  libdrm2:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi5:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
  libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgpm2:i386 libgsm1:i386 libice6:i386
  libjbig0:i386 libjpeg8:i386 libltdl7:i386 liblzma5:i386 libmpg123-0:i386 libncurses5:i386 libodbc1:i386 libp11-kit0:i386 libpciaccess0:i386
  libpng12-0:i386 libsm6:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libtiff4:i386 libtinfo5:i386 libuuid1:i386 libv4l-0:i386
  libv4lconvert0:i386 libwine:i386 libwine-alsa:i386 libwine-bin:i386 libwine-gecko-1.4 libwine-gl:i386 libx11-6:i386 libx11-xcb1:i386 libxau6:i386
  libxcb-glx0:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386
  libxinerama1:i386 libxml2:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxrender1:i386 libxslt1.1:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 uuid-runtime wine-bin:i386 zlib1g:i386
Suggested packages:
  libasound2-plugins:i386 glibc-doc:i386 locales:i386 rng-tools:i386 libglide3:i386 gpm:i386 libmyodbc:i386 odbc-postgresql:i386 tdsodbc:i386
  unixodbc-bin:i386 wine-doc:i386 libwine-cms:i386 libwine-sane:i386 libwine-ldap:i386 libwine-print:i386 libwine-openal:i386 libwine-gphoto2:i386
Recommended packages:
  uuid-runtime:i386 ttf-liberation:i386 xml-core:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gcc-4.7-base:i386 libasound2:i386 libc6:i386 libc6-i686:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386 libdrm-radeon1:i386
  libdrm2:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi5:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
  libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libgpm2:i386 libgsm1:i386 libice6:i386
  libjbig0:i386 libjpeg8:i386 libltdl7:i386 liblzma5:i386 libmpg123-0:i386 libncurses5:i386 libodbc1:i386 libp11-kit0:i386 libpciaccess0:i386
  libpng12-0:i386 libsm6:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libtiff4:i386 libtinfo5:i386 libuuid1:i386 libv4l-0:i386
  libv4lconvert0:i386 libwine:i386 libwine-alsa:i386 libwine-bin:i386 libwine-gecko-1.4 libwine-gl:i386 libx11-6:i386 libx11-xcb1:i386 libxau6:i386
  libxcb-glx0:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386
  libxinerama1:i386 libxml2:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxrender1:i386 libxslt1.1:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 uuid-runtime wine wine-bin:i386 zlib1g:i386
0 upgraded, 70 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 91.9 MB of archives.
After this operation, 265 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Not to mention that by pulling Mesa it might as well break my little patchwork setup with NVIDIA’s 32-bit libGL here. This is not something I’m too keen on trying out while stuck on shitty 3.5G mobile broadband.

I intend to revisit and unravel this conundrum at a later point and try to understand and document my libGL installation solution but, again, I have bigger fish to fry.

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