I´m still a beginner in this field so bear it in mind.
So recently I though of an idea to clean my PC for office usage and eventually I ended up creating and booting up a Fedora Bootable USB. Everything went fine except, after the installation I got stucked at the time zone setup section which after some time searching through the internet I found a solution. I´ve customized to my preferences and lastly I had to install NVIDIA driver. I installed it through CLI if I recall corectly and also I don´t remember the exact command I used but I think there was this word xorg? After that I was finished with the settings I made on my PC and I proudly started to use it. Even games worked better than on Windows.
For reference the specs are:
CPU: i3 10105F
GPU: GTX1660S
RAM: 8GB
One thing I needed to do was turning off the Secure boot and that was pretty much it, no problems after all if we didn´t count the initial setup which somehow crashed when setting up the timezone and my early attempts of installing NVIDIA drivers which on the second try I managed to install correctly.
My laptop, that I use for school and gaming. I go to boarding school. I wanted to install Fedora on my laptop also, so I did and it was a nightmare and still is. I had issues even when booting up the installation USB. Then I found out that if you have 2 GPU you have to start the Live OS in basic graphics mode, which I did and then it behaved like it should. There also wasn´t the bug when choosing the timezone, everything went fine. I installed my software, logged in to some websites on Firefox, and then installed the NVIDIA drivers the same way I did on the PC I use home. After the installation was completed I rebooted the PC and I was welcomed with the GRUB boot loader where I selected the newest kernel, it started to load based on the spinning wheel when OS boots up, and then in midsecond my screen turned black and that was it. At first I thought it is the Secure boot that is causing that so I restarted again, went to UEFI and changed the value of Secure boot to False. You wouldn´t guess what happened next, Windows started to boot?! I double checked if the boot order was correct why by the way I din´t even touch after installing Fedora and the GRUB loader booted first itself but somehow after I changed some setting in the UEFI (Secure boot or boot order) it just automatically was booting into Windows, just like if it ignored the Boot order I´ve set in UEFI. I reinstalled the OS completely and was back at the beginning, but now I turned off the Secure boot before hand to get on a road with least possible issues I could get. I repeated everything to the point of instalation of NVIDIA drivers which I installed now through the Software Center where it also asked me to setup MOK? Which I then fount out is to digitally sign the drivers to work correctly with Secure boot, so I did. And same thing happened, black screen after choosing the kernel and booting to Fedora. After this I tried every method of installing, reinstalling, deleting NVIDIA drivers I could find but none of them worked, which lead me here where I am asking you, what could be possibly wrong? I repeated the same installation steps as I did on the Desktop I have home which works just fine, but my NTB just doesn´t care and it´s doing what it wants. I tried switching Secure boot on and off before installation and after. I somehow managed to change the boot order in Fedora to boot the GRUB first and now I can´t change the order in the BIOS absolutely.
The specs of my NTB are:
CPU: i5 13500H with Intel Iris Xe Integrated graphics
GPU: RTX 4050
RAM: 16GB
I would appreciate any help or time to respond to my post. I´d liked to fix this issue as I got used to Fedora and basically Linux OS.
What is the make and model? We find that on some laptops the BIOS is a bit weird about booting non-Windows OSes. It could be that if you turn off Secure Boot, the BIOS needs you to set something else to allow Fedora to boot.
Still was applicable when setting up my Fedora 42 (on a separate M.2 slot) on an MSI i7 with 3070Ti(cuda drivers), you didn’t say if your setup was dual boot or what you where doing, Did this after fully updating system then adding RPM Fusion repos.
Your GTX1660s uses older drivers, still a good card, keep your expectations low with an i3.
RTX4050 uses cuda drivers, I think.
Dual boot causes problems. Probably no extra M.2 slot.
The GTX 1660 is currently supported by the current 580 driver and is claimed to be supported by the upcoming 595 driver. Not limited to older drivers at all.
The RTX 4050 is fully supported by the drivers from the rpmfusion repo (both akmod and cuda.
Hello again. I came with some news. So I was troubleshooting this issue last 3 hours and came to this conclusion. The notebook works if I set the GPU to use Discrete Only, so the NVIDIA drivers were presumably installed correctly after all. The thing is I think the main issue-maker is the Intel iGPU, I am not sure about it but I think it could be causing this crash-loop. Whenever I turn on dGPU only it boots up like nothing, if Hybrid, then black screen. Can I somehow get info of what GPU the notebook is currently using? If the integrated GPU is working at all? Would do a clean install where everything works out-of-box.
TL;DR
It must be the dual GPU system a.k.a Optimus causing this issue. Intel iGPU maybe doesn’t work or cannot cooperate with the NVIDIA GPU.
At the beginning I don’t know if this change will cause some different issues but so far it´s running just fine.
When your system boots to GRUB loader then:
Hover onto the last Kernel (or Kernel you prefer)
Press ‘e’ on your keyboard
Add i915.enable_psr=0 at the end of the line that start with linux, and also don’t forget to remove nomodeset if it is present
Now you should be able to boot to OS
just fine
Found out that the Intel drivers would not even load based on the info that inxi -G showed, for refference it showed N/A as a driver being used. The NVIDIA drivers and even the nouveau drivers were working just fine. The reason I could boot into Fedora without installing NVIDIA drivers was because I had the nomodeset attribute as booting parameter in GRUB loader. Which is added automatically when the OS is installed in Basic Graphics Mode, which I needed to use to even boot the Live USB and perform the installation of the OS. After this I knew there was something odd with the Intel iGPU or something related to it. The thing that solved this was to disable PSR on boot.
AI explanation:
Panel Self Refresh or PSR, is a power-saving technology that allows the display panel to refresh itself using its own memory rather than constantly waking up the GPU when the screen image is static, resulting in efficient battery consumption which leads to increased battery life.
My guess is that Linux can have potential issues with booting into OS if your display has higher refresh-rate for example mine has 144Hz panel, it can lead to freezing when trying to boot the OS. Or it can also be caused by Dual Booting the system with Windows, or it is just some bug that can happen on some models of NTB. I actually tried installing different OSs with the same result which was black screen. At the end I´ve lost about 20 hours out of my weekend but hey at least it´s fixed now. I will be testing it if everything works as it should and also if the battery won´t be affected by the PSR being off.
I’m curious - did you figure out how the Intel iGPU issue related to the issue you originally raised, i.e. the BIOS not allowing you to set the boot order?
There is a bug with the 580.142 driver that is directly related to the intel iGPU and nvidia dGPU. If you have that driver version and are seeing what you report, the fix you found apparently is one of the workarounds for that bug.
A search on this forum for ‘580.142’ should show several related threads about that issue.