[REQUEST] Fresh LinuxMint 9 KDE nVidia Driver Install HowTo.

[Bornabe]

I have been beating myself up for several days trying every method I've been able to come across to get this to work. I was hoping to resolve this with good searching but am not having the best of luck. My Nouveau Drivers are not enough to enjoy LinuxMint to it's fullest and when I use the Hardware Drivers utility it shows the nVidia Proprietary Drivers to Activate, but after Activating them and rebooting, they show nonActive again.

I've gone through and done all of the tutorials / howtos of installing the nVidia drivers manually, and was able to do so just fine with Ubuntu v10.04. I have not tried Kubuntu v10.04 as I went straight to LinuxMint 9 KDE once I realized it was out a few days ago. I was able to disable / remove / blacklist Nouveau in Ubuntu v10.04 in order to install manually the 256.44 nVidia drivers from their site, which worked just fine for me on it, but in LinuxMint 9 KDE all of the methods I'm finding to disable Nouveau in order to do the nVidia install are not working. It seems Nouveau is really embedded in there, even after removing it completely and seeing it not listed, I end up in Recovery disabling it's integration into the ramdisk with 'sudo update-initramfs -u' and then trying the nVidia install and still get the 'Nouveau appears to be running, etc...' error. A lot of the how-tos are Ubuntu specific or just dated.

When I do install the Proprietary via the Hardware Drivers utility, upon reboot I get a Low Graphics error and it won't allow me to run with the nVidia Drivers.

Can someone please provide a step-by-step guide to Removing / Disabling entirely Nouveau and installing the nVidia 256.44 drivers with ALL the commands entirely necessary from a 100% Fresh LinuxMint 9 KDE Install with only Updates done to it please? I just finished the fresh install, ran the updater and have not and am not going to try the Hardware Drivers utility this time so that removes the steps of having to remove the installed / activated nVidia Drivers.

Toshiba Qosmio x505-Q870 Laptop (Core i7 @ 1.6 GHz) - nVidia 360M - 4 GB Ram
Fresh LinuxMint 9 KDE 64bit Install dual-booted with Microsoft Windows 7 (For Playing WoW at a decent FPS, lol.)

Thank you in advance for any help here. I'm a fairly Linux Newb when it comes to all of the advanced commands used to diagnose and correct something like this so the more up-front detailed you can be, please do. I've noticed an aweful lot of users with the same situation so I'm sure it'll be helpful to more than just me. The other how-to I found that was useful didn't include detailed KDE LinuxMint / Kubuntu instructions so I may have done something wrong or missed something, although I did this just fine with Ubuntu v10.04.

[Old Ruler]

I'm impressed by how much effort you've already put in to sorting it without asking for help. It's a good way to learn how to solve problems in Linux. One thing you mentioned surprised me and, as I will probably try to put some sort of HowTo together (if no one else beats me to it) soon, I was wondering if you could expand on "I end up in Recovery disabling it's integration into the ramdisk with 'sudo update-initramfs -u'". Or perhaps another reader can answer:

Is Nouveau in Mint's initrd?

If so, the blindingly obvious solution is (Don't try it, I don't think it's needed):

this command adds rdblacklist=nouveau option to /boot/grub/grub.conf

Code: Select all

su -
sed -i '/root=/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau|' /boot/grub/grub.conf
mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

But, as a search of this forum said "rdblacklist is not contained in any post" (until now), I'm hoping that need not be mentioned in a HowTo.

The 256.44 driver you mentioned sounds tasty. It has only been out a few weeks and I guess if I'm going to write how to do it, I'd better do it first.

I'll follow this for sure:

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L ... ml#nouveau

And then back to, well I'll do some testing and see what I can come up with, but it could take a while, and there's nothing to stop you having another go. Just make sure to kill any X server that's running before running an nvidia installer. For KDE:

Code: Select all

sudo service kdm stop

I'll be back, I hope...

[Bornabe]

I appreciate the help you're willing to put into this. Everything works flawlessly for me with Linux Mint 9 KDE and it's making me not want any other OS at all. I am so close to being able to fully replace Windows in my life. I'm right there... I just need to get WoW to provide some decent FPS, then boom, no more Windows, lol... until then I'll keep dual-booting.

I want to stick with the 64bit KDE LinuxMint just because well, I've a 64bit CPU and 4 GB of Ram and want to get the full use out of it all. I'm downloading the 64bit Gnome LinuxMint 9 to see if it gives me the same troubles with the video. This problem stretches to nearly every Linux release out there using the Nouveau drivers. I can't get OpenSuSE 11.3, Mandriva One 2010 Spring, Fedora 13 or LinuxMint 9 KDE to get this working easily (or at all so far, lol). LinuxMint 9 KDE has been the best out of all of them as far as everything working. The 32bit version went bunk on my Wireless... it would connect them drop the signal 1 minute later, yet say I'm connected but give no internet... and I posted a solution to that one a while back and just don't feel like messin' with it again right now.

Ubuntu v10.04 worked flawlessly and I was able to update the Video drivers to the 256.44 as well as to the old out-dated ones they include in the Proprietary Drivers finder / installer. I honestly have a hard time liking LinuxMint 9 Gnome for some reason.

I'm going out of town for a week so take your time, if you're able to come up with something, great, if not, we'll get this figured out eventually. I'll have the computer with me and will be doing what I can when I can as well, but am VERY limited on my knowledge to getting this fixed.

[ferro]

Okay. I seem to have found a decent way of fixing this problem. This is just the order I used and the steps.

From a fresh install, I started by editing one line in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nouveau.blacklist=1 quiet splash"

As many have found, the nouveau driver conflicts with the nvidia proprietary drivers and doesn't like to be removed. This is how.
Next you want to run update-grub to make the change and then reboot.

Once your system comes up you should be able to go into the hardware drivers and install one of the proprietary drivers on the list. I've read other posts saying don't use the recommended one, but it works just fine for me.

After doing this however, you probably noticed that the mint splash screen was screwed up, just showing you 5 dots, maybe even showing linux mint in normal text. I'm using an old external monitor on a laptop with a resolution of 1024x768, so those are the numbers I'm going to use for this because I was able to fix that as well.

Back in /etc/default/grub, I uncommented and edited the line "GRUB_GFXMODE" to read:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x24

This changes the resolution of the boot menu, and actually looks fairly decent if you ask me.

Now, that's just half of it.

Next you need to add one line to /etc/grub.d/00_header

Find the lines that read "set gfxmode=${GRUB_GFXMODE}" and "insmod gfxterm"
add the line "set gfxpayload=keep" in between them

Then run update-grub and reboot and you should have the splash screen back and be running a functional nvidia driver.

[ferro]

One extra thing. It makes it easier if you set the resolutions to be all the same as the one you prefer to use in KDE. Before I made the change to the header file, the X server was complaining about the video driver but would then start up normally when I selected the console login option on the low res dialog.

[Bornabe]

I'm going to start fresh and try that now, that would be awesome and would make one hell of an OS setup since I have now completely removed Windows (temporarily, since I do still want to play WoW, lol).

[ferro]

I hope at least one of the drivers work for you. Now that I have it ironed out on my system, I'm currently debating on making a full swap to Mint. At this point, I'm thinking of keeping windows as mostly a game platform (a cold chill just went down my spine saying even that).

[djk]

Ferro's method didn't work for me. I'll stay with the Gnome version. I prefer it anyway.

[ferro]

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly happened?

[Camzl1]

Ferro,

Your method worked for me except: I had to change the resolutions to match my monitor. Also after following your method and then rebooting I received the error on the X-startup that the nvidia graphics server was setup incorrectly. I decided to not use a backup config and to not make a new one. I chose to reconfigure the x-server and whalla it is working now. Thanks for all your help. I love Linux Mint but was using PCLOS 2010 because it was the only way I could get the Nvidia drivers configured Automatically with no hasles. Again Thanks a million

[ferro]

You're very welcome. I'm glad it worked for you. I still haven't tried the newer driver yet. I might get on that later on today.

[noor_baka]

thx a alot ferro and all of you

i am new to fedora 12 and linux-mint 9(gnome edition) only 1-week older linux user
i was in desperate need for this tuturial,although i tried many tuturials in past 3-days, none worked for me .this worked for me


i followed steps for linux-mint 9(gnome edition)


1.installed nvidia current through
menu-administration-hardware drivers
2.rebooted
3.edited one line in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nouveau.blacklist=1 quiet splash"
4.updated-grub
4.rebooted
5.in /etc/default/grub, I uncommented and edited the line "GRUB_GFXMODE" to read:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
6.updated-grub
7.rebooted
8.added one line to /etc/grub.d/00_header

Find the lines that read "set gfxmode=${GRUB_GFXMODE}" and "insmod gfxterm"
add the line "set gfxpayload=keep" in between them
9.updated-grub
10.rebooted

[ferro]

looks about like I said

[Jebtrix]

Just want to thank the people in this thread, I was about to throw in the towel with this issue cursing Canonical for a lame ubuntu release. I installed nvidia's latest beta drivers and it worked like a charm. This is my first time giving KDE 4 an honest try out, so far so good