Nouveau issues on NVidia GT540 prevents Vera install

[nichot20]

I have a Samsung RF711 with Nvidia Optimus GT540 on which Vanessa.happily installed and ran.

Due to an HD issue I tried to do a clean install of Vera(Cinnamon) from a checksum verified ISO. How ever the boot process failed at some point after the Mint splash screen logo. Instead of the usual momentary tty1 screen before the graphics display kicked in there was just a blank screen. Trying [ALT] F2 momentarily brought up a tty screen before switching back to the blank screen.

By dint of performing [ALT] F2 then rapidly logging in. I managed, with much switching back and forth of the display, to run dmesg and it was clear that nouveau was having problems. It was impossible to snapshot the screen with it switching back and forth so rapidly but there were multiple lines with the words nouveau and error or failed in them at the end of dmesg.

I resorted to a clean install of Vanessa followed by a system upgrade to Vera and that worked fine. I held back on the System Reports recommendation to install the Nvidia proprietary drivers until after I had then done a full update.

However, after performing the update, and the required reboot I was left with a system behaving as the Vera install ISO. So it was back to the clean Vanessa install, upgrade to Vera then install the Nvidia driver before performing the update.

This all worked as expected.

Looking at the packages being updated I could find nothing for nouveau but there were Wayland and Xorg updates.

It would therefore appear that there are some issues with the nouveau driver|X-server|Optimus GT540 combination.