I was having this problem and I think it's solved now. I was using the current nvidia driver until my graphics card became obsolete, then I installed the legacy driver and uninstalled the current driver. It was left in a broken state after that.
I tried to dist-upgrade or remove the nvidia packages but it failed telling me to run "dpkg --configure -a". When I tried to do that the command would hang so I was stuck.. Examining the running processes in another console I could see it was the /usr/lib/nvidia/check-for-mismatching-nvidia-module script that hang. I edited said script putting an exit command at the start of the script so I could resume dpkg execution, then I purged all nvidia packages and installed the legacy package succesfully this time. Questions: - what is your Nvidia card (lspci verbose output please)? 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31 Memory at f6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Memory at f4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M] I/O ports at e000 [size=128] Expansion ROM at f7000000 [disabled] [size=128K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: nouveau Kernel modules: nvidia (This is after succesfully removing the nvidia packages, thus the nouveau driver.) - are you on stable, testing or unstable? Testing. - if I understand correctly you have an amd64 installation. Did you add i368 via dpkg --add-architecture? Yes. Had nvidia i386 packages installed. - did you ever have non-legacy-340xx packages installed? Yes. I had them until they become incompatible with my card. - are you installing from a tty or is yours a laptop with an optimus system? It's a desktop system and tried from a gnome terminal and a remote ssh session. I hope this helps someone. Thanks for you support. Best regards. -- Bernat Arlandis
