Downgrading nvidia drivers on Debian 8 to legacy version 304

I have an old HP desktop with onboard nvidia 6150 graphics, and I’ve posted before about installing  the legacy 304 drivers, and installing latest nvidia drivers to support an nvidia 750ti.

I recently moved the 750ti card into my 2008 Mac Pro, so now when booting the HP desktop into Debian with the latest nvidia drivers, Cinnamon crashes, and all I get is a default/low resolution display. So time to go the other way and downgrade back to the legacy 304 drivers (I won’t be moving the 750ti back to this machine).

Taking a gamble that I wouldn’t need to uninstall anything, I followed the steps in this post to install the 304 driver using this command:

aptitude -r install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver

This gave the error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nvidia-legacy-304xx-alternative : Depends: glx-alternative-nvidia (< 0.7) but 0.7.3~bpo8+1 is installed.

… accepting the yes option resulted in no changes, so I uninstalled the package it was complaining about:

sudo apt-get remove glx-alternative-nvidia

This removed a number of the previous 375 driver related modules that I had installed for the 750ti card.

Cleaned up anything no longer needed with:

sudo apt-get autoremove

and then rebooted, and success, back to regular 1920×1080 resolution

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