nVidia drivers (solved)

[jacex12]

Hello!
I'd like to try out Mageia, but there appears to be some problem with the nVidia properiaty driver. I believe that during the attempt of launching a live session, a faulty nVidia driver is matched for my device. The screen goes blank with few white pixels in random places. I have nVidia 710M which is officially listed as supported device for this driver (I'm using the latest nVidia driver on Win8.1, so the card is not faulty), but apparently the Unix version does not support it. After few tests I found out that the screen goes black in every attempt of running a live session of ANY Linux distro that contains a matching nVidia driver. Is there any way to run the session using the nouveau driver?

[doktor5000]

Hi there

At first, which live media did you use exactly? For more information see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_4_Err ... e_CD.2FDVD
in particular the last bullet points to force specific drivers or prevent them from loading.

[jacex12]

I use Mageia 4 LiveDVD Gnome. I attempted to run the system with every driver while blacklisting the others, but the results were either a blank screen with random white pixels or a message "No screens found" from X server. I have 2 graphics cards: Intel HD Graphics 4000 and Nvidia Geforce 710M. Couldn't run it on any of them :/

[doktor5000]

Is this a laptop? If so, what make/model ist that? Does it have Nvidia Optimus, and is that enabled?

[jacex12]

Yes, it's a laptop - Acer Aspire E1-571G (NX.M7CEP.012). It has Nvidia Optimus and it's enabled, but the Wiki configuration (rd.blacklist=nouveau rd.blacklist=nvidia xdriver=intel) doesn't work.

[Akien]

You might have heard that for the last couple of years the Optimus technology hasn't been supported out of the box on Linux. So yes your nvidia card can't be used as is with any Linux distribution, Mageia included.

To make use of your nvidia card, you have to use the Bumblebee daemon. This software makes it possible to run programs with the nvidia card using "optirun <command>", for example "optirun firefox" to run Firefox with the nvidia GPU.
Bumblebee was not packaged properly at the time of Mageia 4's release, so it was not included in the repositories. You might find it in the "Backports Testing" repositories, enable either "Core Backports Testing" if you want to use the open-source nouveau driver, or both "Core Backports Testing" and "Nonfree Backports Testing" for the proprietary nvidia version.

I yet have to write a proper howto about installing Bumblebee.. You can find some information about which are the required packages here: https://ml.mageia.org/l/arc/discuss/201 ... 00109.html

Feel free to ask again here for more guidance if you need some.

[jacex12]

I don't necessarily want it to use my Nvidia card, I just want it to run (every distro that doesn't have nvidia driver works fine on my Intel GPU).

[doktor5000]

It has Nvidia Optimus and it's enabled, but the Wiki configuration (rd.blacklist=nouveau rd.blacklist=nvidia xdriver=intel) doesn't work.

Doesn't work means what exactly? Apart from that, this is only one proposal - it tries to blacklist nouveau and nvidia drivers, and tries to use the intel X driver - which is not what you want, and which may not work at all related to your BIOS settings.

What you should try:

Code: Select all

xdriver=nouveau
rd.blacklist=nvidia xdriver=nouveau
rd.blacklist=intel rd.blacklist=nvidia xdriver=nouveau
xdriver=intel

Or something along those lines ...


@Akien: This is about booting from live media, bumblebee installation/configuration is not possible there

[jacex12]

The Wiki configuration gave me 2 errors: "No screens found" and "'i915': No such device found". I'll try the ones you proposed and update.
Okay, adding just the silly "xserver=intel" makes it work, funny I didn't think of that, anyways thanks a lot for your help!
*also had to do [Ctrl]+[Alt]+2x [BS], because the screen goes blank anyways

[doktor5000]

Well, if you try to force the system to use the intel driver, but the intel driver doesn't detect a usable device, there's no graphics driver at all

Please provide feedback so we can update the wiki and augment the existing instructions.

[jacex12]

Updated previous post ^

[doktor5000]

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [SOLVED], thanks