Make disabling Nouveau easier.

[Insidious611]

So, this has really, *really* annoyed me today. And I am admittedly not entirely sober, so I apologize if I'm a bit brusque, I'll look back on this post and edit it for tone later if need be, but the way Linux Mint handles something as simple as trying to install nVidia's linux drivers as downloaded from their website is absolutely ridiculous.

I wanted to do this because you're currently shipping nVidia Driver 331 which is quite old, and very much not recommended for e.g. Steam.

First off, when trying to run nVidia's driver installer, it quits because the "distribution provided pre-install script" failed. I took a look at this script, and was annoyed to find that all it was was an "exit 1", with the justification of "Prevent nVidia driver installer from overwriting Ubuntu packages". Well, for one, I don't *have* the Ubuntu nVidia driver package installed, and I think a script preventing me from overwriting it should, I dunno, only be installed *if* I have it installed in the first place? And for two, this seems to be a case of the distro *assuming* the user doesn't know what they're doing.

That, in and of itself, annoys me.

But then we get to the meat of the problem, and the real reason I started this thread: Nouveau.

I appreciate that the open source community has gotten so far towards making a truly open source nVidia GPU driver, it warms my heart, but the fact is, if I want to use nVidia's own drivers I need to disable it. This should be simple. modprobe.d's blacklist functionality has existed for years and is suited for this purpose beautifully. nVidia's installer even creates its own blacklist file that *should* work to blacklist the nouveau module.

It doesn't.

So I tried creating my *own* modprobe.d blacklist file, to see if that would work.

It didn't either.

So I looked online to see what other people in the same boat were doing, and found a thread that suggested adding "blacklist.nouveau=1" to your kernel commandline.

That didn't work either.

So I looked online *again* to find if anyone was having this issue, and found someone on these forums stating that they had to add "nomodeset" too as of Linux Mint 15. So I did that.

Voila, success! Or so i thought. I booted into a 640x480 mode, was able to kill X and get to installing the nvidia driver, which worked. But then, out of curiosity, I decided to run lsmod to make sure that nouveau really wasn't still running.

It was.

I have, in a last minute desperate measure, added "modprobe -r nouveau" to /etc/rc.local

But this is completely ridiculous. To the point that it's hard for me *not* to resort to foul language to describe how ridiculous it is. Linux Mint should *not* be circumventing *3 different ways* of me telling it what I want it to do. I feel coddled, like this distribution doesn't think I know what I'm doing and wants me to think it knows best. I don't like that feeling, that feeling is why I don't like running Microsoft operating systems or Apple ones. I don't feel like that's something that should be imported into Linux.

For all I know, all of this is just stuff you guys imported from Ubuntu, so I'm not blaming you, but it needs to change.

[Pjotr]

These problems have more to do with a defective implementation in the .run installer file that you've downloaded from the Nvidia website, I think....

For installing the latest Nvidia drivers, I advise to use the mamarley PPA:
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... nvidia-PPA
(item1, left column)

Then it should go easily and flawlessly.

[DeMus]

Or use the Driver Manager in the system settings. Then things go automatically.
Using Pjotr's way you can get newer drivers then when you use Mint's Driver Manager, but maybe there is a reason for that.

[Insidious611]

I wouldn't say it has anything to do with the .run from nVidia's website, considering that I ran lsmod each time after *trying* to disable nouveau and it was still running, despite at one point being blacklisted in 4 places. (on the kernel commandline, in modprobe.d blacklist twice, and with nomodeset). That's what I'm complaining about the most, I feel that something must be wrong with Linux Mint's modprobe/kernel (or whatever scripts/executables/patches are overriding the default behavior) if it's not obeying these directives. The same things work fine on Debian as far as disabling nouveau (in fact, just letting nvidia's .run disable it itself with the modprobe blacklist works fine).

Also, the "exiting because of a bad pre-install script" behavior is fine on behalf of the nvidia .run (it's doing what it's supposed to do, exiting based on an error on a script provided by the distro) and in fact what either Ubuntu or Mint developers intended with their script. Give /usr/lib/nvidia/pre-install a read. Nasty stuff, no developer should make a script on a distro specifically designed to break another program.

Good suggestion on the PPA though, thanks