Issues with Nvidia nouveau/proprietary driver after/during install

Ask Fedora
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Hey Guys,

Yesterday I started the installation of Fedora however immideatly encountered an issue. After a succesful check of my installation Media, and it starting to load into the live USB it only showed a black screen. After tinkering a bit around I tried unplugging my main Monitor (which is 240hz WQHD) so that it could only use my secondary (144hz FHD) Monitor. With this Fedora managed to boot into the system with the nouvea drivers. When trying to plug in my main monitor it showed up as a fhd 144 hz monitor and after a restart it again resulted in a full black screen.
Additionally when trying to install the proprietary drivers it lets me download and install them and after installing them a message with already installed comes up.
Trying to verify this with nvidia-smi it shows up that it couldnt communicate with the drivers.

I hope anyone has a idea how this can be resolved.
If any additional information is needed ill try and provide it.

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There are a lot of important considerations when dealing with the graphics adapter

You have to consider the desktop environment/display server, the version of the card/driver

And then essentially, you simply have to install the driver correctly, which going the distro route, might take some trial and error, as things change over time.

Generally if you are picking out default install CD’s then with nvidia especially, you may need to use nomodeset on the kernel command line before starting the installation, depending on the combination of hardware/drivers/desktop environment

This has improved over the years, but it’s important to remember.

For the best experience with nvidia, you will want to use the xorg display server, i.e. a desktop that wont crash or bug out.

Also if you want a desktop that wont ever crash or bug out 100% of the time, then you will want xfce.

If you can deal with the desktop bugging out, crashing 10-20% of time (combined with xorg) then you can choose kde-gnome.

If you can deal with the desktop crashing/bugging out freqently, all the time, then you can use unstable experimental wayland

So, as you might be able to gather, there are actually quite a lot of caveats, and complexity when it comes to linux.

If you already have the desktop installed, and want to get your nvidia driver working, you simply have to figure out how to get it installed correctly, which may even include removing the old bad install of nvidia. (sometimes it’s even easier just to begin with a clean reinstall of the whole os)(which might take all of 5 minutes)

I haven’t used fedora in years, and can barely remember it’s specific considerations, and we are being mobbed by chatbots in the forum now, which makes me reluctant to install it again. (but basically it’s an internet search away… how to… on fedora 43/44) (type in the version of fedora your on + how to)(do what you want to do)

But that’s what you have to do simply, and combined with all those vital considerations, you should be able to successfully use nvidia

So to reiterate, if youre on stable fedora 43, then you would use this search:

“How to install the nvidia driver on fedora 43”

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Of course if you talk to the chatbots, theyll tell you there are no important considerations, and just use the system, just install the system, and there are no problems…

So yea, that stuff is getting crazy

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What is your hardware - particularly, do you have an iGPU as well as the dedicated Nvidia GPU?

Is your main monitor connected over HDMI or DP?

I ask particularly because the AMD Linux drivers can’t support the highest resolutions and refresh rates over HDMI, so that might be an issue if you have an AMD iGPU and that’s what’s actually driving the monitor.

Are you trying to do this on the live USB? Unfortunately you can’t test the proprietary drivers like that. They only take effect once you’ve rebooted to pick up the Nvidia kernel module. But on the live USB, there’s nowhere to persist that kernel module, so rebooting just gets you back to Nouveau.

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Did you follow the instructions from RPM Fusion: How to Nvidia ?

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So im using a rtx 4070 and yes i do have an additional iGPU and I havent used chatbots since u mostly only get wrong answers. What ive now tried and it worked was to deactivate secure boot then sign the drivers manually and then to enroll these new keys. After that I rebuilt the drivers to be safe and now it works with nvidia proprietary drivers + I havent had any issues with my monitors.

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The rpmfusion doc linked above is always the most recommended install method for the nvidia driver and usually seems to work in 99+% of all cases.

Disabling secure boot is a good first step, After installing the driver the steps recommended by rpmfusion (which are a recap of the content of the file \usr\share\doc\akmods\README.secureboot) will ensure that the driver is signed and can be loaded after secure boot is again enabled.

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@k4rn4lp4n4c Please stay on topic, and avoid posts and post-content that is neither emphasizing the actual topic of the author nor the boundaries of the category. Everything else belongs to the The Water Cooler category. Thanks :classic_smiley:

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