Arch Linux

cobalt33

Member

Registered: 2013-12-23

Posts: 1

NVidia driver woes

Hi everyone

I have recently bought a new a Laptop, complete with UEFI and Windows 8. Initially I put Linux mint on it, and this worked straight out of the box, although I'm not sure what driver it used . After a lot of faffing about learning about UEFI and gummiboot I got a working bare bones Arch Linux Installation on it. Unfortunately  when I tried to launch X11 I entered a whole world of pain.

The graphics card is a Geforce GT 635m 2GB. I downloaded the latest proprietary drivers from the NVIDIA website and ran the installer which worked fine.

Without an Xorg.conf, with the NVidia driver,

I got told :
Screens found but no usable configuration
Fatal server error, no screens found

I looked up my model and some people had found adding bus info to Xorg.conf helped, so I ran the NVidia tool to create xorg.conf and added:
BUSID PCI:1:1:0

this helped, and X11 tried to load, but it got stuck on:
Loading Extension GLX

so I ran startx -- -extension GLX to stop that loading, and got further, this time the terminal disappeared and was replaced with a blackscreen with a white cursor, not blinking or responding though.

I gave up with Nvidia and blacklisted the module in modprobe.d. rebooted, checked nouveau was loaded with lsmod, and ran startx.
This freezes at the same place, loading extension GLX, but this time I could control C and regain control.
I tried startx -- -extension GLX, and got the message in the log:
could not insert Nvidia, no such device
no screens found

I'm not sure why its mentioning NVidia, according to lsmod nouveau was loaded.

At this point I'm out of ideas, can anyone help shed some light on this?  It must be possible as Linux mint achieved it effortlessly, although as I said unfortunately I didn't check what driver it used.
Im posting this from windows but if you want the proper logs I can boot arch up and get them.

Thanks in advance.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: NVidia driver woes

Why didn't you use the nvidia package?
Please do post the logs. What do you have in your ~/.xinitrc?

clfarron4

Member

From: London, UK

Registered: 2013-06-28

Posts: 2,165

Website

Re: NVidia driver woes

The graphics card is a Geforce GT 635m 2GB. I downloaded the latest proprietary drivers from the NVIDIA website and ran the installer which worked fine.

I looked up my model and some people had found adding bus info to Xorg.conf helped, so I ran the NVidia tool to create xorg.conf and added:
BUSID PCI:1:1:0

this helped, and X11 tried to load, but it got stuck on:
Loading Extension GLX.

Is that with or without Optimus?

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