jockey silently fails to enable nvidia driver

Please do this for debugging:

  sudo killall jockey-backend
  sudo /usr/share/jockey/jockey-backend -l /tmp/jockey-backend.log

and on another terminal:

  jockey-gtk -e xorg:nvidia-96

then please go back to the first one, press Control-C, and attach /tmp/jockey-backend.log. Thanks!

Here's the output when running jockey-gtk -e xorg:nvidia-96

WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia failed: modinfo: could not find module nvidia
WARNING: modinfo for module fglrx failed: modinfo: could not find module fglrx
WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia failed: modinfo: could not find module nvidia
WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia failed: modinfo: could not find module nvidia
[After authenticating]
WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia failed: modinfo: could not find module nvidia
WARNING: /sys/module/nvidia/drivers does not exist, cannot rebind nvidia driver

jockey-backend printed this:
FATAL: Module nvidia not found.

Running "jockey-gtk -l" causes the same first four WARNING lines as above, while it does print the two xorg:nvidia-* drivers to stdout.

Attached is the log output of jockey-backend --debug -l <file>
Using jockey-gtk 0.5~alpha1-0ubuntu4

Notice that there's a python exception (only when using --debug)

Thanks, looks good so far (nevermind the exception about sl-modem in --debug, that's normal).

After you tried to enable the nvidia handler in jockey, what's the output of

  dpkg -l *nvidia*"
  lsmod | grep nvidia

and your /etc/X11/xorg.conf ?

After running "jockey-gtk -e", jockey downloads the correct package and installs it. That process is very visible in the GUI.

So "dpkg -l" shows nvidia-glx-96 as being installed. If I enable the 71 driver, then it would remove 96 and install 71.

Since I did not enable the nvidia driver, I deleted my xorg.conf to launch X in the fail-safe mode.
"jockey-gtk -e" creates this xorg.conf file:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Default Screen"
        DefaultDepth 24
        Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load "glx"
        Disable "dri2"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Default Device"
        Driver "nvidia"
        Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

That actually looks fine then? It seems that jockey actually enabled the package and the xorg.conf changes. Does it show anything weird/wrong after enablng?

Please keep in mind that versions 71 and 96 do not actually *work* in Intrepid, they'll just crash X and fall back to some safe defaults (see bug 251107). Maybe that's the problem here, and this bug should be marked as a duplicate of 251107?

Using the GUI to enable the driver, the light stays red and nothing else happens.

If things look fine, my gripe is that I see nothing weird after enabling. The least I expect is an error message telling me that something went wrong.

From "jockey-gtk -l"'s output I understand that a package can be "Enabled" and it can be "In use", and that these are two different things.
After enabling the package with -e, this is what -l prints:
xorg:nvidia-71 - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 71) (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use)
xorg:nvidia-96 - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 96) (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use)

Should -e at least mark it is "Enabled"?

Yes, indeed it should be marked as enabled afterwards, so that's a bug. It checks the following things in order to consider a driver as enabled:

  - xorg.conf must have Driver "nvidia", which seems to be the case according to comment 5

  - if xorg.conf is invalid (syntax error, etc.), it is regarded as "disabled". This isn't the case here (with your xorg.conf)

  - the package nvidia-glx-96 is installed; does "dpkg -s nvidia-glx-96" succeed and show you the package description?

  - the module nvidia is not blacklisted (I don't think that's the case); this should give no results:

       grep -r 'blacklist.*nvidia' /etc/modprobe.d

  - the nvidia module is available; does "modinfo nvidia" succeed and show you the module description?

I suspect that the last item fails, and the module is not available, but I'll wait for your answer before theoretizing further. Thanks!

You're correct. "modinfo" doesn't show the module.

Any chance of displaying a message if any of those steps fail?

Yes, there should be some kind of feedback. Thanks for your debugging help!

Exact same issue w/nVidia Quadro4 900 XGL (AGP 4x, 128MB) & 2.6.27-4-generic. Followed the above and received the same as Ori. Until nVidia release new drivers it's probably better that 71 & 96 not even show up in jockey, as tends to give the user the idea that their nVidia card will work.

NoOp [2008-09-30 20:34 -0000]:
> Until nVidia release new drivers it's probably better that 71 & 96
> not even show up in jockey, as tends to give the user the idea that
> their nVidia card will work.

Yes, if that's not rectified by the time of the final release, I'll
make sure that something like this happens.

I just noticed that this bug is still open. This issue was fixed in bug 288662.

I think we have two different bugs discussed here. The original problem of immediate silent failure occurs on a stock intrepid desktop CD with an nVidia quadro board with a recommended nvidia-177 driver (nothing to do with the legacy driver issue from bug 288662). After using update manager to do a check for updates (but not installing any of them) jockey-gtk -e xorg:nvidia-177 runs for about 10 seconds then returns the following dbus error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/jockey-gtk", line 377, in <module>
    sys.exit(u.run())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/jockey/ui.py", line 395, in run
    self.argv_options.confirm, False):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/jockey/ui.py", line 594, in set_handler_enable
    polkit_auth_wrapper(self.backend().set_enabled, handler_id, enable)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/jockey/backend.py", line 104, in polkit_auth_wrapper
    return fn(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/proxies.py", line 140, in __call__
    **keywords)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus/connection.py", line 607, in call_blocking
    message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
nwadmin@nwadmin-laptop:~$ jockey-gtk -l
xorg:nvidia-173 - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173) (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use)
kmod:wl - Broadcom STA wireless driver (Proprietary, Enabled, In use)
xorg:nvidia-177 - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 177) (Proprietary, Enabled, Not in use)

I had jockey-backend running in a separate window as suggested above and about 30 seconds after jockey-gtk crashed the backend kicked to life and apparently installed the driver successfully.

It seems to me that the silent failure is related to a repository/package problem on the CD. The dbus failure might be a download timeout.