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I have a MotionComputing M1400 pen tablet. It runs Debian Squeeze, and today I noticed it was using software rendering for OpenGL, so I decided to try to use the intel driver. My chipset is the Intel 855GM. When I initially installed Debian, I had to modify xorg.conf so it would pick up my pen. That /etc/X11/xorg.conf is here. To install the driver, I added the ppa ppa:glasen/intel-driver and ran sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel. Upon reboot, my cursor is visible, but I'm sitting at a black screen. My cursor changes to a text selection cursor when I move it over certain parts of the screen, which seem to be the login prompt. I went into tty6 and stopped gdm3 with /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop and then tried Xorg -configure, which failed. Here is the log file it produced. I tried to combine the xorg.conf.new it created with my original xorg.conf into a new xorg.conf, which is here, but that didn't work either. What should I do to get a graphical interface back?

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    Is there any specific reason to go with the ppa instead of the Debian package? There's also a backport of a newer version, 2.15.0.
    – sr_
    Aug 7, 2012 at 6:48
  • When I use the Debian package, it falls back to software rendering, as reported by glxinfo.
    – Suchipi
    Aug 7, 2012 at 7:15
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    I'd give the backport a try (instructions).
    – sr_
    Aug 7, 2012 at 7:39
  • The backport did the trick. Thanks, @sr_ !
    – Suchipi
    Aug 7, 2012 at 21:59

1 Answer 1

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Is strongly recommended not using ppa's on other Debian-based systems, since those packages were meant for Ubuntu-only distributions. That said, there are different ways you can update your packages.

1. Backport

You can backport your package as said sr_ with the provided instructions.

2. Use unstable repositories

This was already explained here.

3. Build from Debian source

You can get the most recent driver from the Debian package page and build it yourself (you can search the source using http://packages.debian.org/src:package_name). Just download the .dsc, orig.tar.gz, and diff.gz (the package may not include that last one) in a single directory and execute dpkg-source -x package_version-revision.dsc. It will build a nice .deb file that you can install using dpkg -i. Be sure that you have all the build dependencies using apt-get build-dep package_name and your source repositories activated in the sources.list file.

4. Building from Debian-git

Using the same package list as above, look for the "Debian Package Source Repository" section, and clone the repository (you must know how to use git). Enter in the just created directory and run dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -nc, you can also modify the source and apply patches. In the parent directory there will be your recently created .deb packages.

5. Building from the upstream

This is more complex to achieve since each piece of software has its own way of building/installing, but in most cases involve:

./configure --prefix=/opt/something ## The prefix indicates where to install so you can delete it later and it won't mess with your systems' installed packages.
make
make install

You must consult the documentation in those cases.

You can debianize this package too, using dh_make.

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