Bug#692761: nvidia: gnome shell hangs randomly, errors in Xorg.0.log

[Diederik de Haas]

On Thursday 08 November 2012 17:29:54 Andev wrote:
> How do I enable unstable repository?

Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

You probably also want to create or add to /etc/apt/apt.conf the following:
Apt {                                                                                                                                         
        Default-Release "testing";                                                                                                            
}; 

If your /etc/apt/sources.list has "wheezy" lines instead of testing, use wheezy 
instead.
This will make sure you install packages from testing/wheezy by default and only 
install packages from other archives (unstable) when you explicitly say so.

To install the nvidia package from unstable, do the following:
aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-nvidia -t unstable

This should pull in that package from unstable including it's dependencies.
If it reports dependency issues, let aptitude offer you other suggestions until 
the issues are resolved.
Another useful parameter for aptitude is "-s" which stands for simulate, so you 
can experiment as much as you want (also as normal user) without actually 
committing the changes.

> And I don't want to use an unsupported release other than for testing
> purposes. So, is it possible to downgrade to testing later on?

instead of "-t unstable", do "-t testing" (or wheezy).
If that doesn't work, add "/testing" to the package you want to downgrade, like 
xserver-xorg-video-nvidia/testing. You may have to supply all the package names 
you wish to downgrade (not sure why that is).

HTH,
  Diederik