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Hey all,
So I've built a custom arch ISO for a few friends at college as well as myself to use with an X server included. So far all the laptops we have are Optimus enabled. I know that means that I can't get 3D support (except through something called bumblebee, but I haven't looked at that yet) but that's not what I want. I just want to have a full resolution desktop in X with cuda support on the nvidia GPU. Starting up arch and getting the cuda support without X works fine - I just have to unload the nouveau driver and modprobe the nvidia driver and it works. The problem is getting a usable X desktop working. It seems X refuses to use the i915 driver, and instead reverts to using mesa. Normally this would be fine, but the resolution is locked to 1024x768 and on my laptop (Acer 5745PG, i5 480m, nvidia GT420) the desktop is out of range of the physical screen itself. The entire desktop appears to have moved up by an inch, leaving a grey bar at the bottom and me being unable to use MATE's top panel.
On top of that, when I try boot to my desktop, which has only an nvidia GPU in it, it also seems to ignore the blacklist.conf I have in /etc/modprobe.d/ that blacklists nouveau. Nouveau still loads for some reason. Not sure why that's happening. The real problem however is that it also seems to use vesa on my desktop. The resolution is so low and pixelated I can't read anything or see anything. I managed to make my way to change the resolution but that just got it stuck at some unreadable res.
Another issue I need to get fixed is a way to kill the X server and be dropped back to console. Right now the only way I can on my laptop is to start up a terminal and killall X. The problem with this is that I get left with a black screen, no usable console. If I press ctrl+alt+delete the system reboots gracefully like in a normal arch live disk, so the system doesn't hang or anything like that.
Any help is much appreciated.
Last edited by biltong (2012-05-03 15:22:34)
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Solved it, vesa was taking preference over all the other drivers, so I removed it from the ISO and it now uses fbdev which is fine for my purposes. Vesa was also stopping me from doing anything after killing X - with fbdev I don't have that problem.
Still don't know why nouveau is loading even though it's in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. I can stop that through syslinux though so that's okay.
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