[Solved] Struggling to Get NVIDIA Working With Gnome on Arch

crawler9 · 2018-08-24 04:14:55

System Information:
Model: Sager NP9377 (Clevo p377sm-a) laptop
Intel Core i7-4910MQ (64-bit)
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 980m SLI (No Intel Graphics)
RAM: 32GB DDR3
OS Drive: 1TB mSATA
Other Drives: 2 x 2TB HDD
BIOS Mode: UEFI
Custom BIOS: Prema Mod 1.03.10PM v2

Issue: Failure to boot into Gnome after installing proprietary NVIDIA drivers. nouveau drivers seem to work fine, but I plan to do some gaming and other things that will likely require the proprietary driver.

I'm fairly familiar with other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but my previous Arch experience is extremely limited. This is my first true arch install. I've used Antegros and Manjaro briefly to play with pacman a bit and get familiar with it before deciding to dive into Arch itself. The problems detailed within this post exist in a pure Arch install, not an arch-based, inspired, or otherwise changed distribution. I would like to point out that the drivers that are giving me issues on Arch worked successfully on the more preconfigured environments with those two distributions, so I'm fairly confident it's not an incompatibility, just something I'm doing wrong (or not doing) somewhere. I know these distros are NOT Arch, even though they may share the same package manager.

Most of my install efforts come straight from the installation guide with very few deviations. I'm including a very detailed description of the steps I've taken installing my system so anything I've missed can be more readily identified. If there is any other information I can provide, please let me know. If anyone has suggestions, I'll be working from the setup detailed below with no other changes. (I've reinstalled since all of the things I've tried.) Some of the things I've tried are blacklisting nouveau manually, generating xorg.conf with nvidia-xconfig, and using the latest .run file from NVIDIA's website (which also doesn't work).

Installation process:

Confirm system is booted in UEFI mode

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

-Lots of efi vars

Determine wireless configuration

# iw dev

-Output is wlp5s0

Connect to WiFi network

# wifi-menu wlp5s0

--Connected to my network with password. Tested connection with successful www.google.com pings

Determine disk setup and mount proper partitions

# fdisk -l
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc5
# mount /dev/sdc5 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot && mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
# mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi

Install system and items I need
-iw dialog wpa_supplicant for wifi support on installed system
-intel-ucode because I have an Intel Core i7 processor
-grub efibootmgr os-prober for installing/servicing grub configuration
-sudo so I can use sudo on the installed system

# pacstrap /mnt base iw dialog wpa_supplicant intel-ucode grub efibootmgr os-prober sudo

Generate fstab for system

# genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

Enter installed system

# arch-chroot /mnt

Configure locale and time settings

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York > /etc/localtime
# hwclock --systohc --utc

--Uncomment en_US.UTF8 UTF8 in /etc/locale.gen

# locale-gen
# echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf

Configure hostname and hosts file

# echo sager > /etc/hostname
# echo -e 127.0.0.1'\t'localhost'\n'::1'\t''\t'localhost'\n'127.0.1.1'\t'sager.localdomain'\t'sager > /etc/hosts/

Configure accounts

# passwd
# <my root password>
# useradd --create-home muffin
# passwd muffin
# <my user pass>

--Uncomment %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL in /etc/sudoers

# gpasswd -a muffin wheel

Install grub

grub-install /dev/sdc
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Exit arch-chroot and boot into installed system

# exit
# reboot

--Login as muffin

Remake grub.cfg- being done from main system as os-prober doesn't work within the live install to detect my Windows install.

$ sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Connect to WiFi

$ sudo systemctl enable wpa_supplicant
$ sudo systemctl start wpa_supplicant
$ sudo wifi-menu

--Connect to my network with password, then successfully ping test.

Update system, install xorg and Gnome + NetworkManager to use the WiFi tray icon within Gnome

$ sudo pacman -Syyu
$ sudo pacman -S xorg xorg-server
$ sudo pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

Setup services before reboot

$ sudo systemctl enable gdm
$ sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager

$ reboot

-System reboots and loads Gnome login as expected, with nouveau driver

--Connect to internet via WiFi system tray icon

Install NVIDIA Drivers- nvidia and nvidia-390xx both tested- results are the same

$ sudo pacman -S nvidia
$ reboot

--System fails to boot, hangs on quiet mode at/dev/sdc5: clean. With quiet mode removed in grub, I stall at [ OK ] Started Authorization Manager. If I switch to tty2, remove nvidia and nvidia-utils, and reboot the system boots up into Gnome fine again.

Here's my dmesg output: https://hastebin.com/uqutenukis.coffeescript. I can't find an xorg log file or anything else that seems connected in /var/logs.

Last edited by crawler9 (2018-08-24 22:34:22)

seth · 2018-08-24 06:27:38

Do you fail on gnome or on GDM?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GD … rg_backend

If that's not the case, please paste your xorg log, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#General

Unrelated, but ftr:

$ sudo systemctl enable wpa_supplicant
$ sudo systemctl start wpa_supplicant
$ sudo wifi-menu
$ sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager

From whos crappy blog ever you *actually* got those install instructions, they're broken. You're trying to manage your network w/ three concurrent services, which will cause trouble sooner or later. Pick one and drop the others.

crawler9 · 2018-08-24 11:43:28

Thank you for the reply, Seth. I'll work through your links in more detail after work and see if disabling wayland gets things going.

As for the network configuration, that's all on me. I didn't find that in a blog. I was struggling with wifi-menu at first and journalctrl (or something similarly I'll verify when home) seemed to point towards wpa_supplicant not being active as the reason for previous failures to get wifi-menu to work after reboot. Enabling it got it working so I thought I needed it in general. I'll disable wpa_supplicant if Network Manager conflicts with it after work. wifi-menu for me was a means to get an active connection to install xorg and Gnome after reboot and to obtain network connectivity from a TTY in the event of boot failure and I determined I needed network manager running due the the prompt in Gnome's wifi menu after booting successfully into Gnome with nouveau.

Last edited by crawler9 (2018-08-24 11:55:59)

crawler9 · 2018-08-24 22:34:00

Seth,

Disabling wayland was the solution. Thank you very much.

Arch Linux

#1 2018-08-24 04:14:55

[Solved] Struggling to Get NVIDIA Working With Gnome on Arch

#2 2018-08-24 06:27:38

Re: [Solved] Struggling to Get NVIDIA Working With Gnome on Arch

#3 2018-08-24 11:43:28

Re: [Solved] Struggling to Get NVIDIA Working With Gnome on Arch

#4 2018-08-24 22:34:00

Re: [Solved] Struggling to Get NVIDIA Working With Gnome on Arch

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