Arch Linux

Don Coyote

Member

From: Great Lakes Region

Registered: 2010-09-06

Posts: 109

Geforce 8800 GT with Wayland

How are video drivers handled when using Wayland? I installed GNOME on my system using Wayland. As I was trouble shooting a resolution setup problem, I saw a forum post instructing that attempts to trouble shoot anything related to Xorg were futile as only Wayland mattered in such a system, and what I've found in the Archwiki also states that Wayland is a replacement for Xorg. However, xorg-server was apparently installed as a dependency for other software as it is installed on my system.

The GUI seemed to be working fine after install, but soon started regularly freezing for minutes. journalctl revealed many "nouveau" related errors and a little more research showed it is likely a driver issue. The 8800 GT wants the 340.xx driver. After attempting to install it from AUR, I realized the circular dependency it described is because the legacy driver wasn't compatible with newer versions of Xorg. I didn't expect this to be an issue because I am running Wayland. Even though the makepkg attempts for the driver and other packages all failed with errors resolving dependencies, something was altered and the system now boots to a blank screen with cursor.

Should I go forward and revert Xorg to a version that is compatible with the legacy driver while keeping my current setup with Wayland, or do I start over and install a GUI based on Xorg first?

Last edited by Don Coyote (2020-08-25 22:22:17)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,668

Re: Geforce 8800 GT with Wayland

Wayland doesn't work reliably with modern nvidia drivers, let alone nvidia 340xx. However xorg is still on 1.20.x based versions and should still be compatible with it, so I'd say you have more chance with a xorg based 340xx setup.

You might want to post about these errors you are getting and the outputs you are receiving, eyeballing the comments people seem to be generally successful in installing it.

Last edited by V1del (2020-08-25 23:26:04)