Good evening. I am using Fedora 35 XFCE on a HP8710p laptop.
This is an older laptop, Intel Core Duo 2x2ghz, 4mb RAM, with a NVIDIA NBS Quadro 320m graphics chip and that is where my problems began.
I have used Fedora with 33, 34 and now 35 all using the XFCE desktop. Under 33 I had to fight to get NVIDIA installed but after a long time I managed to do it and all was well. Under 34 things became hellishly unstable and I had a lot of issues and eventually gave up trying to use the NVIDIA drivers.
Now I am back to 35 as a new install and I simply decided to forgo playing with NVIDIA and just use the default drivers instead and see how that went (It went well and the OS was stable) but then things changed, the OS had different ideas and after some updates suddenly my install time lengthens considerably and I get the error msg: ‘nvidia kernel module missing falling back to nouveau’ and after a few seconds of staring at that msg my system starts as normal and all seems ok.
Well, not so fast because suddenly I have experienced two system hangs forcing me to shutdown the laptop the hard way as it had become unresponsive to any keyboard input or mouse actions. And that was simply doing web browsing. Up until the error msg suddenly appeared Fedora 35 was stable and I had no issues whatsoever. But after an update now it’s becoming difficult.
Can anyone help me with this>?
From what searching I have done, I apparently need to shutdown the XServer and install the NVIDIA driver, so that is exactly what I did. I downloaded the NVIDIA driver - NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.108.run
Then I went into a terminal, and shutdown the xserver (GUI) and installed the driver. Driver install seemed to go ok until it warned me about the nouveau driver and suggested that it be blacklisted, I said okey dokey and the driver install failed as it was unable to blacklist the nouveau driver.
I admit, I’m somewhat confused. I’m also stalemated by the lack of logic when it comes to driver installations on linux. Yes, the system used a default generic driver to access system graphics, etc for initial installation. Yes it’s not the proprietary driver it’s generic but surely an installation for the correct driver on this OS should contain routines to replace the generic driver with it’s own code and then point all appropriate system flags/pointers to itself, not require me to manually update grub/grub2 and then go traipsing through system files to manually change X and Y to suit the new driver.
How would that be useful or even conducive to any form of stability?
Any assistance would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks for reading.
Reganrds, John