Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine)

Stephen M

Stephen M

Author Level
It seems the latest Ubuntu will install easier than its predecessors on some machines. I have just put it on a Defiance from 2018 and a 2016 Optimus and both went flawlessly with no issues before.

When the Optimus was new I had a few problems, including log in loops caused by the Nvidia drivers but this time with a straight install it worked out of the box with the nvidia drivers running from the start, often Ubuntu would default to X.org and you needed to switch to the nvidia.
 
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chateauferret

Member
I've only obtained later Ubuntu distros via the distribution upgrade path but 19.10 is about the first to work without incident. 19.04 wouldn't install a combination of kernel and NVidia driver that wouldn't behave like my two cats, and I ended up having to install them both by hand.
 
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markh

Bronze Level Poster
Yep same here, installed on a newly bought Vortex IX with RTX 2070 and was completely hassle-free. I upgraded the Nvidia drivers to the most up to date ones as I'm using the GPU for machine learning, but I'm sure the stock ones would have been fine for gaming.
 
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bhunachicken

Active member
I'm probably going to be getting a new laptop in the new year.

Do you know if 5Ghz wifi is supported on the Intel AX200? Part of the reason I'm getting a new laptop is due to my current one only supporting 2.4Ghz wifi and the interference from other (2.4Ghz) access points in the neighbourhood is getting pretty bad.
 
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bhunachicken

Active member
Ah, okay. Well, fingers crossed in January everything works okay :)

This is the spec I'm looking to build:

14" LAFITÉ IV

Chassis & Display: Lafité Series: Aluminium Chassis: 14" Matte Full HD IPS LED (1920 x 1080)
Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor i7-10510U (1.8GHz, 4.9GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM): 16GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card: INTEL® HD GRAPHICS (CPU Dependant) - 1.7GB Max DDR4 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
1st Storage Drive: 500GB SEAGATE BARRACUDA 2.5" SSD, (upto 560MB/sR | 535MB/sW)
Battery: Lafité Series 3 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (36WH)
Sound Card: Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless: GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (2.4 Gbps) + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options: 1 x THUNDERBOLT PORT (USB-C) + 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS
 
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arplaz

Member
I have a Vortex Series 17.3" laptop from 2013. I was using Ubuntu on it, currently it's the 19.10 edition, but for at least two years now Nvidia graphics is not working on it, only works with the Intel graphics.
 
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arplaz

Member
During boot and before the login screen there is an error message relating the Nvidia card.
And I really don't understand how these drivers are working, but I will not buy Nvidia card again, that's what I have learnt from this saga.
 
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arplaz

Member
Well, it is detected by the system. And also the nvidia driver is installed.
It was working briefly between two system updates. So, I am not 100% sure, but I think that
the card is probably in a working condition.
The laptop had Windows last time in 2013 when it was delivered.
 
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drgr33n

Active member
There's been some changes to how optimus works. Previously, optimus was only available via some X hacks like nvidia-run or bumblebee. From version 435 of the Nvidia drivers, prime is supported natively with all the trimmings. I'm not sure because I don't use Ubuntu but they may of updated things to use official offloading. More info here: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/435.17/README/primerenderoffload.html

Optimus has always been a pain in the butt. I've had to add silly kernel boot parm hacks and all sorts over the years to get it to work and even then it's rubbish. No where near the performance of Windows. I have tinkered with the new prime offloading within Arch and its much faster.
 
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arplaz

Member
Thank you for your post. It's nice to see there are people who can make it work. Unfortunately, I don't understand the technicality behind these drivers. Could you give me any hint how to learn these things?
Yes, for some reason even when nvidia driver is installed the OS is still using the intel mesa driver.
I just wonder is this hardware specific? Are these problems come up for instance with a Dell laptop or System76 as with Clevo configurations?
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Afaik System76 are Clevo chassis - what they (claim they) do to add value re Linux is on the software side.
 
Stephen M

Stephen M

Author Level
How have you tried to change your drivers. If you go into "software and updates" and then "additional drivers", there you will se a list of available drivers, if it is on X.org you need to select one of the Nvidia drivers (I am on an Octane from three years ago and working fine with the -390 driver, not the latest) and it is not always the latest that is the one you need. Then click "apply changes". You will probably need to reboot after that for the change to take effect.
 
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drgr33n

Active member
arplaz said:
Thank you for your post. It's nice to see there are people who can make it work. Unfortunately, I don't understand the technicality behind these drivers. Could you give me any hint how to learn these things?
Yes, for some reason even when nvidia driver is installed the OS is still using the intel mesa driver.
I just wonder is this hardware specific? Are these problems come up for instance with a Dell laptop or System76 as with Clevo configurations?
Click to expand...

No problem, I'm no kernel dev though. I only know what I do because I've been using Linux as my main OS for well over a decade and have struggled with Nvidia ever since these discrete GPU's became a thing. Nvidia have never been Linux friendly and always treated us like second class citizens. I feel they've only just made the effort to support things a bit better now due to the rise in Linux gaming, machine learning & AI. Lots of developers prefer to work on Linux due to a number of reasons. Before you read on, I'd like to say that all information provided is a bit loose and simplified to make it as easy for the average user to understand. Apologies to the hard core Linux guys that I know will be reading this and itching to correct the terminology used.

So, there are two types of GPU's you can have inside a laptop, dedicated and discrete. Dedicated means that the Nvidia GPU is the main output device. Discrete graphics actually utilises two GPU's. The main integrated GPU (iGPU) what is normally Intel and the discrete GPU (dGPU) that's a headless Nvidia GPU that picks up the slack under heavy workloads. When using the Windows drivers, the Nvidia drivers work with the hardware to detect when it's required to offload work to the dGPU and handles the transfer. The reason these are popular amongst laptop manufacturers is that it saves power. Dedicated Nvidia graphics support is normally pretty well supported by most distributions and Nvidia release driver updates regularly but the same cannot be said for Nvidia discrete hardware.

Nvidia has never been Linux friendly and getting information out of them about hardware is like getting blood from a stone so development within the Linux space has been very slow. These issues date back over a decade and it's only recently started to improve with the latest versions of the propriety drivers that now support. It's a very deep and complex subject that I could spend days writing about so I'll spare you the technical details. If anyone want's to learn more, they can find everything with a quick google search.

So now you know the two types of GPU's, let's take a look at some common issues that people face with Nvidia discrete graphics.

1) ACPI issues

Manufacturers don't tend to stick to the standards when it comes to ACPI. And this causes a lot of issues within the Linux ecosystem. Due to the ties to power management, these issues quite often happen with laptops with discrete graphics. You can normally get around these issues with a kernel parameter. First, try adding this to your kernel parameters.

Code: 
acpi_osi=! acpi_osi="Windows 2009"

Without boring you with the details, what this entry is doing is first disabling all built-in vendor strings and the second call is setting the vendor string to Windows 2009. This tricks the bios into thinking it's booting into Windows and loads a different maps. The Windows 2009 variant always seems to work well with recent kernels. If you're having issues with your dGPU while booting and seeing kernel errors etc, it's worth trying this first. If that doesn't work, you can also try the sledge hammer approach and disable ACPI completely. I don't recommend this though as it can cause all sorts of weird errors. But it's always worth trying to see if it fixes issues with the dGPU. To do this, add the following kernel parameter.

Code: 
acpi=off

2) Driver issues

These can also be a pain to diagnose due to all the moving parts that are required to make all this work. Because of all the issues and most of the development of these features being new I would suggest you use the beta drivers in most cases. In any other situation I wouldn't recommend this and it doesn't sit well with me to advise users to use beta software but in this case you will have the best chance of success.

I know Debian hasn't caught up yet as it the new offloading support requires updates to some core packages as well as running the latest and greatest propriety drivers from Nvidia and they're all about stability. I've read Ubuntu 19.10 now supports prime offloading out of the box. You'l still need to install all the required packages to make this work. I think they have a nice new switch you can install to make switching onto the discrete GPU easy. Once you have the propriety Nvidia drivers installed, you can install mate-optimus with the following command.

Code: 
sudo apt install mate-optimus

If you're rocking an older version of the drivers but still want to play a bit of CS:GO, you can use the Bumblebee implementation to switch over to the Nvidia dGPU. This has been well documented for more distributions so I'm not going to cover old ground here.

Hope this information helps. If you're still struggling and would like me to try and see if I can get you on the right track, could you post a full spec of your laptop including all hardware and the full error you're seeing in the logs etc and I'll see if I can put it right for you.
 
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drgr33n

Active member
Oussebon said:
Afaik System76 are Clevo chassis - what they (claim they) do to add value re Linux is on the software side.
Click to expand...

I think System76 do some bios tweaking from memory to make things like ACPI play nice with the Linux Kernel. They have also integrated the same old hacks like FedorePrime and bumblebee into their PopOS distribution. This may of changed since the Nvidia now support this out of the box. I'm out of touch with all this though so you'd have to check out their website or give them a call. Plus, let's not promote the competition too much hey :D
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
There are plenty of Clevo resellers that do custom BIOSes. That's still software/driver side rather than hardware, which was the question above - though it may not have been the right question :)
 
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drgr33n

Active member
Oussebon said:
There are plenty of Clevo resellers that do custom BIOSes. That's still software/driver side rather than hardware, which was the question above - though it may not have been the right question :)
Click to expand...

For sure, there are so many layers to the problem and that's what makes it so complex. The only difference with System76 and most other resellers is they tweak their software and firmware for use with Linux. The one thing they do that most other resellers don't (from memory) is tweak the DSDT tables to play nice with Linux. They also do extensive testing with the hardware and Linux. My guess is most other resellers firmware modifications only go as far as to add their logo. But I could be wrong :D
 
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