[How to] Upgrading to Mageia 8 with an older Nvidia card

[johnpenguin]

If you have upgraded to Mageia 8 and you experience flickering or other visual artifacts with your older Nvidia card, then Mageia might have defaulted to nouveau.

I upgraded from 7 to 8 and everything went smoothly. The upgrade automatically selected a new Nvidia driver (470) as the old one (340) was deprecated and I logged into Mageia 8.

Then I noticed that there was periodic flickering, especially noticeable around the top panel or the window title bars, and it became even worse while playing streaming videos.

I checked /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log and discovered that the actual graphics driver running was nouveau. Also, trying to run nvidia-settings gave an error message about 'NVIDIA driver not loaded'.

Going through the Mageia Control Center, the applet immediately recognized that it should download the 390 driver, but upon trying to install it it errored.

Running drakx11 as root from the command line gave messages about conflict with the already installed 470 driver.

Could not install the x11-driver-video-nvidia390 package! conflicts with x11-driver-video-nvidia-current-470.86-1.mga8.nonfree.x86_64

Continuing from the command line, I removed the existing nvidia driver:

Code: Select all

urpme dkms-nvidia-current
urpme dkms-nvidia-current-doc-html
urpme dkms-nvidia-current-utils

Running drakx11 again, the correct driver was installed correctly without hickups. At the final screen with the xorg options, remember to check the box to start graphical interface on boot.

[morgano]

Thank you
For now added this tip to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_8_Rel ... DIA_driver, linking here.
(which is also linked from https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_8_Errata#Nvidia)

Switching to 390 for supported drivers, was supposed to be automatic IIUC...
EDIT: I guess it works automatically for fresh install, but this manual intervention is needed at upgrading from Mageia 7 /EDIT


@johnpenguin, optimally open a bug on this so it can be improved.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly

[johnpenguin]

I opened a bug report at https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29835

Also, after checking some older notes, I'm not sure whether 340 or 390 was used before the upgrade, but whatever it was it was substituted with 470.

[morgano]

Thank you John.
Added linking to and from the bug.