Graphics card configuration issue

Hello, new to the community.

I installed Silverblue (41), for use with Auto-GPT, and I am having issue with getting the graphics card operating.

[Its a throw together until I get moving]
Mobo: Rogstrix B450F Gaming
CPU: Ryzen 7 2900x
RAM: 16GB
SSD: Crucial M.2 500GB
Display (PCIEX16_2): MSI 210
ML (PCIEX16_1): Tesla K80

I have been using ChatGPT to help configure, with pretty decent progress, but I am having issue configuring Fedora to properly use the 210 to display - i have a spare gigabyte game gpx that i swap the tesla out to configure then shut down and rearrange the cards again and back again.

Any help would be appreciated, I am very novice in linux based OS’s.

Hi and welcome to :fedora: !

I understand you have a legacy NVIDIA card. On Fedora, one would use the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion for such cards, according to their instructions.

Your card model seems to be covered by the legacy 470xx drivers. I am not sure whether those work on Wayland as well, or only on XOrg.

In order to install the drivers, the steps (as detailed below) are a bit different on atomic desktops than on traditional ones. While ChatGPT could give you answers to specific questions, I would recommend also reading through the documentation, to understand how these systems work. See the Silverblue docs, as well as rpm-ostree’s man page.

Steps:

  • pin the current deployment:
sudo ostree admin pin booted
  • layer the RPMFusion repo packages, as detailed here:
rpm-ostree install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
  • reboot into the new deployment
  • layer the NVIDIA driver packages:
rpm-ostree install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx akmod-nvidia-470xx
  • reboot into the new deployment
  • check that the drivers are installed and loaded:
rpm-ostree status
lspci |  grep -i -E 'VGA' | cut -b1-7 | xargs -i lspci -vnnks {} | grep -v "<access denied>"
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The 470xx drivers do not properly (if at all) support wayland. If using that driver version or older then it seems mandatory to use X11, which will be difficult at best since xorg was removed from the default config of f41 for both KDE and Workstation. I am unsure about the status of xorg on silverblue.

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Given that the RPM part of rpm-ostree works with the same repositories, a Silverblue user should be able to install X11 by layering the corresponding packages.

However, for testing purposes, I went on to layer the packages xorg-x11-server-Xorg
and gnome-session-xsession, and while GNOME on Xorg does appear on the cogwheel, selecting it and entering the password sends me back to the main GDM screen.

So I would recommend the OP to stick with nouveau and Wayland, if NVIDIA driver version 470.xx means Xorg only.

If there are chances that the driver might work on Wayland, the OP can give it a try, given that they can boot into the previous deployment if anything goes wrong.

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