[SOLVED] Black screen after i386 nvidia drivers installation for Steam on Debian 9

[S U S T E N A N C E]

Hello everyone,

I'm writing because I have an issue regarding the steam installation on Debian 9.

I want to have a dual boot on my main desktop with Debian and Windows, so everything here starts with a fresh install of Debian.

To install Steam, I use the procedure from the Debian wiki, and the last step is to install the i386 nvidia drivers by issuing the following command :

"apt install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386"

This installs the nvidia libraries for Steam to run. During the installation, it says there is a conflict (with the kernel I think) and so that it just needs to reboot.

But when I reboot, it doesn't boot back, it just shows a black screen, but the drivers are installed for sure, because my 3 screens power on, while when there is no drivers only one works.


I caught the following messages before it goes all black :

"bcma: unsupported SPROM revision : 11"
"bcma: bus0: no SPROM available"
"b43-phy0 error : found unsupported phy (analog 12, type 11 (AC), revision 1)"


I've searched everywhere I could but no answer. I've seen many people talking about this being Wi-Fi related but if it was the case I believe that it would have caused trouble from the very beginning, not after nvidia drivers installation.

I've also tried to start with the "nomodeset" parameter for Grub but it doesn't help. I can still boot with "init=/bin/bash" though.

My specs are :
Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Aura
Intel Core i7 6700k
16GB HyperX Fury DDR4 2133MHz ram
Dual Asus Nvidia Geforce GTX 980Ti Strix connected with an SLI bridge

I also want to say that by installing the nvidia 64bits drivers from the website everything was working fine but no Steam as it requires the 32bits drivers.

Has anyone had this issue and managed to fix it ?

Thanks to everyone who read as it is a long message.

[Cat on Linux]

maybe you can have better luck with Nvidia proprietary drivers? while under root privileges try

apt-get update && apt install nvidia-driver

restart your OS (reboot) to make sure it swapped video driver and blacklisted old one

also before installation make sure to have in /etc/apt/sources.list
something like this

deb http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/mirrors/debian/ stretch contrib non-free

see this article for the overview of the process
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

[Cat on Linux]

first off get to terminal and install that Nvidia driver to revive your system. then come back and we'll see how to make your steam running

[S U S T E N A N C E]

Hello,

Thank you for your time.

Installing the proprietary nvidia driver before installing the i368 one worked, now everything is working as expected.

[Marlock]

If your Debian is 64-bit you need to install the 64-bit version of the nvidia driver, preferably before the 32-bit version.

You need both because the 32-bit driver you installed will work only as an extra for running 32-bit games, everything else is using the 64-bit version.

That is why this fixed the issue.