installing nvidia drivers on a Elimina 17 laptop with Fedora Linux

[kshen]

Hi,

I have installed Fedora Linux on mynew Elimina 17.3 laptop, which has a Intel Core i7 11800H CPU, with a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. Hoowever, Fedora shows the graphics graphics processor as Mesa Intel UHD Graphics.

Does anyone have experience running Elimina (or other laptops) with nvidia drivers, rather than the UHD Graphics? The documentson the Linux drivers from nvidia's website suggest that there is a problem using the drivers with optimums technology, which I understand my laptop uses. In addition, fedora package management system provide multiple nvidia X11 drivers Does anyone have experience with these drivers, and how to chose between them?

I don't want to install these drivers, in case they are incompatible with my laptop and breaks the existing graphics support I have.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Cheers,

Kish

 

[astiak]

Hi Kish,

I haven't used Fedora myself, with that GPU however you can use the current NVIDIA drivers.

Optimus has improved on linux, with NVIDIA now supporting prime offload (only with Xorg however). If you use wayland, it will not be a pleasant experience, for the time being. That is also being worked on as far as I am aware.

More details here:

Howto/Optimus - RPM Fusion

Good luck!

 

[Stephen M]

I rarely use Fedora so cannot help there but something I noticed on some PCS machines, including two Optimus was that they were ok with nvidia drivers but not always the latest ones. A main problem was a log in loop but that could be solved by purging the nvidia drivery via a ptty terminal and after that it was trial and error, downloading a set of drivers and seeing which ones worked. I believe the log in loop rarely happens now.

Agree with Astiak, stay away from Wayland at the moment. I generally install in safe graphics mode then fiddle with drivers after that.

 

[kshen]

Hi Astiak and Stephen,

Thanks for your replies.

I wasn't aware of Wayland - this seems to be an alternative to X. How do I know if I am running Wayland or X.oeg server? I am using MATE desktop.

Is there some standard way of starting 'safe' graphics mode', or does this depend on the Linux version you are using? I want to be able to play around with the drivers safely, so that if it does not work, I can revert my changes.

Does anyone know what the advantages do the native driver have? Will it mainly apply to complex 3-D graphics, like games? Would there be any advantages for playing videos?

Thanks again,

Kish

 

[Stephen M]

It will depend on the distro as to how you go with safe graphics. As for advantages to using native drivers, not really sure. A few years back I would always go with Nvidia as things did not run smoothly with the Nouveau/X.org drivers but these days they seem fine as well.

 

[astiak]

MATE doesn't support Wayland fully yet, so you should be on X.org. You can check if wayland is running on Fedora (at least according to their docs) by typing echo $WAYLAND_DISPLAY and it will return nothing if wayland is not running, or wayland-0 if it is.

There isn't really anything like safe graphics mode for nvidia as far as I'm aware. It will be a case of trying the different drivers (i.e. native/proprietary) and seeing what works for you. You may be required to make changes from a TTY terminal should something not function.

In most cases the Xorg server should need no configuration to have a working system. Occasionally you may have to create an xorg.conf file for everything to function as you want. For example for myself, if I want to use HDMI, I have to ensure my system is running on the dedicated graphics card as I haven't got it to function yet with nvidia prime. I therefore wrote a bash script to load/unload specific xorg.conf files and restart X as required (much like what bumblebee does).

I would recommend keeping backups of working config files if you do play around.

For any hardware video decoding, gaming or in some cases even 2D acceleration, proprietary drivers are the way to go. Nouveau support is very limited on the newer cards (See https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html). I would stick to the proprietary drivers.

 

[mcp42]

Hi,

I have installed Fedora Linux on mynew Elimina 17.3 laptop, which has a Intel Core i7 11800H CPU, with a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. Hoowever, Fedora shows the graphics graphics processor as Mesa Intel UHD Graphics.

Does anyone have experience running Elimina (or other laptops) with nvidia drivers, rather than the UHD Graphics? The documentson the Linux drivers from nvidia's website suggest that there is a problem using the drivers with optimums technology, which I understand my laptop uses. In addition, fedora package management system provide multiple nvidia X11 drivers Does anyone have experience with these drivers, and how to chose between them?

I don't want to install these drivers, in case they are incompatible with my laptop and breaks the existing graphics support I have.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Cheers,

Kish

Do you need to install Fedora? I use Centos7 at work and it can be a right pain sometimes. I would try Unbuntu

 

[Mnemonic]

Fedora shows the graphics graphics processor as Mesa Intel UHD Graphics

I don't have the Elimina, but am thinking about purchasing one to use as a Linux workstation.

In regards to your question - what exactly are you trying to do? Just get the Nvidia drivers installed and working?

Here's a few things to consider/try:

1. What's the GPU setting in your BIOS? Most BIOSes will offer "discrete" and "hybrid", and some have "iGPU" too.
2. Are you sure it's not just Runtime D3 (RTD3) - where the Nvidia GPU powers itself off when not in use?
3. What's the output of nvidia-smi?
4. What's the output of lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"?
5. If you're in "hybrid" (switchable GPU) mode, what are you using to switch GPUs? "Optimus Manager"? "Prime Select"?

If you just want to use the Nvidia GPU, easiest way to do that is set your "GPU" to "Discrete" in the BIOS, and install the Nvidia driver.

If you want to use switchable GPUs, then you have to set your "GPU" to "Hybrid" (might be called something else) in the BIOS, install the Nvidia driver, then install something like 'optimus-manager' (you'll then have to set up optimus-manager to tell it how to switch and manage GPU power - it's not the same for all Nvidia GPUs, depends on model).

 

[AndyCooke495]

Edit - Apologies if I should have started a new thread for this. I never really know whether or not my problem is similar enough to the OP to warrant a whole new thread or not.

Hi All,

I was hopefull when I found this thread and then my heart sank when the I saw it seems to have died.
I just got a 17.3" Elimina with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti. My OS of choice is Mint Cinnamon (But I have tried Mate and LMDE5) on this machine and I am getting the same behaviour.

I have installed the Nvidia drivers 510.60.02 but it is defaulting to Nvidia on Demand mode. Whenever I change it to Performance Mode then the machine hangs on boot straight after the LUKS decryption stage. Total black screen, no response to any key press/combos. Only thing I can do is reinstall the OS and try something else. I've already done this 5 times today. It's currently hung again. About to start OS reinstall no. 6

I've tried setting "nomodeset" in grub and disabling "quiet splash" try and catch an error message but nothing.

I really don't want to have to install windows on my shiny new laptop. I can't stand it.

System info is in the attached screenshot.