tldr; After installing the Nvidia drivers in my existing Fedora 39 KDE install, I see the boot animation and my wallpaper, then only a white cursor on a black background.
I made sure my system was fully updated and running the latest kernel before attempting this. Shutdown my PC, switched out my Radeon 6600 XT for a Nvidia RTX 3060. After rebooting, everything was still working (so it seems that there’s no issue with the GPU itself). I followed the instructions provided by RPMFusion Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion to install the Nvidia drivers. Ultimately, what I ran was:
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
Everything installed successfully. I waited a few minutes as instructed, and then rebooted. I was thinking you only check the modinfo -F version nvidia after you’ve rebooted to make sure the drivers are present, not before it. However this turned out to not matter anyway.
After rebooting a second time, everything seemed like it was booting normally. I saw the Fedora boot animation, followed by the KDE Plasma splash, then my desktop wallpaper. But then the screen flashes black, followed by showing another wallpaper (I have mine set to show a random wallpaper per login, so maybe it’s reloading the session?) then followed by a black screen with my mouse’s cursor in the middle. It’s movable, but there is nothing else, clicking and pressing the Meta key does nothing. I can switch to another terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F3 and run commands fine.
I checked ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded and thought maybe I rebooted before the kernel had finished compiling. So I uninstalled the Nvidia drivers:
sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
sudo dnf remove akmod-nvidia
I rebooted, expecting to get a desktop again but without the Nvidia drivers (I know; this didn’t actually uninstall the drivers, I work this out later). It did the exact same thing, flashing two wallpapers and then black screen with a cursor in the middle. So I reinstalled the drivers again, waited very long and then rebooted. Same result.
I do not have Secure Boot or TPM enabled on my motherboard, and I checked them to make sure.
Running nvidia-settings resulted in a tonne of “CRITICAL” strings. For example:
fedora nvidia-settings
(nvidia-settings:3639): glib-GObject-CRITICAL g_object_unref **: (current time) assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
Running glxinfo -B:
Error: Unable to open display
Running modinfo -F version nvidia:
550.54.14
A few excerpts from dmesg:
nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel
nvidia: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
nvidia: nvidia-nvlink NvLink Core is being initialized, major device number 237
nvidia-uvm: uses symbols [...] inheriting taint
nvidia-modeset: Loading Nvidia Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms 550.54.14 Thu Feb 22 01:25:25 UTC 2024
[drm] loading driver [...]
[drm] initialized nvidia drm [...]
nvidia-fallback.service - Fallback to nouveau as nvidia did not load was skipped because of an unmet condition check (ConditionPathExists=!/sys/module/nvidia).
Running lsmod |grep nouveau outputs nothing.
I then ran the “Recover from Nvidia installer” instructions from RPMFusion:
sudo rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/libGL.so.* /usr/lib{,64}/libEGL.so.*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
sudo dnf reinstall xorg-x11-server-Xorg mesa-libGL mesa-libEGL libglvnd\*
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.saved
and rebooted (the mv command failed, I guess this is because I’m using Wayland not Xorg); this has gotten me back to a functional desktop. To make sure, I reinstalled the Nvidia drivers a third time, and the behaviour remains the same. Any help for getting the Nvidia drivers up and running would be appreciated.
My specs,
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M K
GPU: ZOTAC Nvidia RTX 3060 OC
CPU: Ryzen 5 5500