A couple of pre-install questions

Support
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Hi,

I’ve been looking into OM-Rome as a potential replacement for my current Fedora 37 KDE spin install on my Asus ROG Flow X13 (2021) Laptop. I have read through the Wiki, and skimmed the last 12 months posts on the support forums. I’ve tested OM-Rome in a VM and also a Live-USB boot, and it mostly looks promising. There are a couple of questions which I have, that I’ve not been able to find answers for:

  1. In the Live-USB boot, I noticed that there were no power profiles available in the power menu, so Power Saver / Balanced / Performance modes were not available. Installing ‘power-profiles-daemon’ seemed to solve this, but I wonder why it isn’t provided as default, and if there are any other packages, or kernel tweaks that interfere with it or which may prevent it working as intended?

  2. I would be installing OM-Rome to a USB-C SSD to test it out alongside my F37 install. In the Calamares installer the most appropriate option for me was Replace Partition (iirc), which allowed me to select an unused portion of my SSD, but it insisted on using the ‘/boot/efi’ partition on the internal nvme drive rather than creating a second ‘/boot/efi’ partition on the USB-C SSD. This would prevent me using the USB-C SSD on another machine if I needed to (afaik). Having read through the wiki, I think I can manually create the partitions and install it with everything on the external drive, but I wondered why it wasn’t possible to select the external drive as a location for ‘/boot/efi’? Am I missing something?

  3. As my laptop has both integrated (AMD Vega 8) graphics, and dedicated (Nvidia GTX1650) graphics I will be needing the proprietary Nvidia drivers for the occasional game or Blender use. I noticed in the forum that there’s currently an issue with the nvidia packages with the latest kernel. Is this something that happens on each kernel release (so I’d have to hold back kernel upgrades), or is it something specific to this particular kernel / nvidia version?

Sorry for the long / waffly post, and if any of these questions could have been answered by me having better google-fu skills. OM-Rome looks very interesting, and from what I have seen / read the community looks nice also, and I would like to become part of it - if I can get the essential (to me) packages installed and working. If there’s any laptop-specific information that I have missed, I would be grateful for any links / etc.

Getting Supergfxctl (asus-linux / supergfxctl · GitLab) working will be my first task after installing OM as switching between Integrated / VFIO / Hybrid Gfx modes is essential for me. If it goes well, then I’d could perhaps write up some guide / documentation for OM.

Running OM-Rome would be going full circle for me, as (iirc) Mandrake Linux was my first look at Linux back on my Amiga 1200 when I was a youth! :slight_smile:

Thanks to all the Devs for all the work you do on OM.

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Welcome to the OpenMandriva forum @LaoTsu.

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  1. I leave for more knowledgeable folks.

  2. You would need to use Manual Partitioning to have an new /boot/efi created if there is already an existing /boot/efi. The why of this should be explained by a developer or someone more knowledgeable.

  3. This was discussed in OpenMandriva TC-meeting 2023-01-11.

The issue is does OpenMandriva delay the release of a new kernel for all users just because nvidia patches for the proprietary drivers are not ready. OpenMandriva has no control over when those patches are available that is upstream, I believe at nVidia the company.

In the meeting we:

  • Agreed: There should always be working nvidia packages for current production and latest legacy drivers for kernels on released iso’s.
  • Agreed: For new kernel in testing repo after 3-4 days, publish if there’s a good reason why the nvidia packages haven’t been built for the new kernels, and after 7 days publish no matter what.

This issue has existed since I used Fedora in 2004 and is unchanged today. The decisions behind this are made by nVidia the company. It is true that different Linux distributions handle this issue differently.

4

Thanks for the reply (and welcome) Ben.

I’ll set some time aside tomorrow and do a manual partition and install, I just wanted to check I wasn’t missing something simple.

As for the Nvidia issue, thanks for clarifying. I’ve only used Arch and Fedora on this laptop since getting it, and they both compile the nvidia modules on installation of a new kernel. I’ve had to use a custom kernel for Asus specific issues until now, but those patches are all included in the main 6.1 kernel, so I’m free from needing a custom kernel.