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                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 22ND FEBRUARY, 2025
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: No keyboard/mouse after NVIDIA driver updates
   DATE: Sat 22 Feb 19:39:07 GMT 2025

I run Debian testing, currently Trixie, on all my machines. I always have. I
also make a lot of tweaks to my setup. So, this is may be my own fault. I’ve
just spent over three and a half hours trying to fix an issue with the X
server causing my trackball and keyboard to stop functioning.

First thing I do every day is check for updates. Today I noticed an NVIDIA
driver update (from 535.216.03-1 to 535.216.03-2) and an Intel microcode
update, along with some other updates.

I rebooted to apply the microcode changes. Then I logged in at the console and
manually started X. The mouse pointer was frozen. Then I discovered that my
keyboard wasn’t working either. The only way to kill X was to SSH in from my
mobile and kill it. I always start the X server manually for such occasions.
In the past the NVIDIA drivers would regularly break leaving you with a blank
screen and no keyboard/mouse to do any debugging. Since then I always boot to
the console.

I then went googling and trying various fixes for the problem. I eventually
realised that /var/log/Xorg.0.log was lying to me, what I needed to look at
was ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log instead…

I can’t remember when the logs for X were changed but I seem to remember it
was a privacy/security thing to stop other users looking at your log file.

I finally discovered that the X server legacy wrapper no longer detected that
the NVIDIA drivers needed the X server to start with root permissions. With
that nugget of knowledge I updated /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config and forced it to
run as root by adding: needs_root_rights=yes

Three and a half hours of good coding time wasted… *sigh*

I then wanted to see if the NVIDIA updates had any effect on the performance
of the LLMs I’m using for AI. Sadly there was not much difference :(

I still need to write about my AI adventures. I was going to start today until
this happened, and now I’m out of time :(

--
Diddymus


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