Petter Reinholdtsen

KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?
1st June 2010

It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to wait.

I came across two bugs related to this issue, #583312 initially filed against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious that the nvidia drivers were involved, and #524751 initially filed against kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.

To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is, but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.

I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.

Tags: bootsystem, debian, debian edu, english.

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