Driver headache under Manjaro linux... (Arch base)

[sedrosken]

So the nouveau drivers for my GT730 GPU don't work right, and don't work right on ANY linux distro, not just this one. Freeze up the system after so long in use, about an hour depending on what I'm doing. Last time I could fix the problem by removing nouveau and installing the proprietary nvidia drivers which gave me better performance in the first place. However Arch has messed with how they handle the installation of proprietary nvidia drivers -- I have to pick the one for my kernel, which is 4.3. I choose this one, remove nouveau and reboot. I'm stuck at a console with no visible way to even provide input to the machine, no login prompt, nothing. Stays here for as long as I let it. I Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get into a command console and reinstall nouveau to give me X11 back. But now I'm back to the freezing. Apparently Nouveau was installed and meant to use KMS but never did so there's nothing for me to change for the proprietary driver to work, and yet it never does! Might try reinstalling the nvidia driver and going with the driver pacman suggests for me. That probably won't work either but it's worth a shot.

If any of you know what's going on or can find out, please help me out on this. I've searched around, found nothing useful, tried to get an Arch forums account to post there but the security question was something entirely bizarre, asking me to put the output of a certain command and telling me it was wrong when I did. I wasn't planning on spending my weekend having to troubleshoot my main machine. I went with Manjaro so I WOULDN'T have to deal with stuff like this and yet here I am. This isn't so much the fault of Manjaro as it is the fault of the Arch distro it bases off of. If I thought straight Arch would end any differently I'd gladly try it.

 

[timwhit]

I'm not very familiar with Arch, maybe Chewy will be around to help you. This should be pretty easy to do with an Ubuntu based distro. Maybe try that if you want something simpler. I prefer Xubuntu.

 

[sedrosken]

The installation of the nvidia drivers is probably somewhat at fault. Last time I had Arch it worked perfectly well, installed the nvidia driver and compiled it with my kernel for it to work automatically. This one I don't think is working. This version doesn't seem to blacklist the nouveau module which is why with both installed nouveau loads anyway, but when I blacklist the nouveau module manually it acts as though I removed it on a reboot. Going to investigate my libgl driver, think it may be behind this. Why can't stuff like display drivers just work under Linux? I mean, nVidia is a pretty damn big GPU brand, having it freeze on the open source drivers is not a good thing to be doing! And people deride the Radeon for its poor support on Linux. At least those drivers don't randomly freeze!

I'm on an Arch derivative because I very much prefer its package management, meaning I can easily install stuff like eduke32 and gzdoom that on Ubuntu or one of its kin would involve adding repositories at best and building from source at worst. I'd rather not have to do either.

 

[Chewy509]

Sed, Is Manjaro rolling release like Arch or does it peg packages for a period of time? (the mentioning of the kernel make me wonder). The only time you need to worry about kernels and X versions is with the AMD proprietary drivers since they lag in support for the newer releases.

The only time I've had issues with nVidia drivers on Arch, is when the current driver drops support for older hardware and you need to revert to a legacy driver...

Anyway. Uninstall all the nouveau based packages from the system. Reboot and you should be at a command prompt. Log in, install the proprietary drivers and reboot.

Out of interest which login manager are you using?
If it's lightdm, after you install the nVidia drivers, remove /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf, as some gtk themes and lightdm and nVidia don't work together... This will reset the lightdm state back to defaults that work.
If it's gdm, then it's esily fixedl. Basically gdm will try to run as a Wayland client (which the nVidia driver doesn't support) and you get a blank screen. You need to force gdm to use X, instead of Wayland. Basically, you need to uncomment WaylandEnable=false in /etc/gdm/custom.conf and reboot.

If using the nVidia drivers fail to give you a X session, switch to another VT (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and get the output of $ journctl -b and also look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. This should give you some insight.

All the above is based on Arch...

FYI, nVidia have very little to do with the nouveau driver (IIRC they only give out some documentation under NDA, they have nothing to do with the actual code, so you can't blame nVidia directly for the state of the nouveau drivers).

 

[sedrosken]

I know that nVidia is not to blame for this piteous state.

Manjaro is supposedly semi-rolling release. It uses the -MANJARO kernel instead of -ARCH, which is a few versions behind (4.1.x instead of 4.3). I figured this out and I'm working on trying straight Arch since it might actually end differently.

I think Manjaro uses LightDM. But it doesn't matter much now because I'm currently installing straight Arch. If I end up at the same impasse I'll let you guys know. My advantage here is that working with vanilla installs of everything might work better than the Manjaro-custom ones, and I can install nVidia's driver first and foremost, skipping nouveau altogether and avoiding any conflicts with it. Sadly my incoming connection is slow enough that installing is going to take all day.

What I learned this time is that the quickest way to a working Linux install is not necessarily the best way.

 

[Howell]

Note: the ratio of time one spends installing vs using an os is directly proportional to the impotence one places on install speed.