To those of you who have nVidia hardware there are revised drivers in the cooker non-free repository.
A new naming scheme has been adopted for these drivers.
There are two versions of the current drivers nvidia-390 and nvidia-440.
The 390 series supports “Legacy” cards back as far as the GTX-480.
The 440 series supports from the GeForce GT 640.
For full lists of supported GPU’s see the included README docs.
The installation of these drivers should be automatic to a greater or lesser extent. The modesetting driver is now enabled.
Installing the X driver “should” pull in the nvidia dkms module.
If it does not then first install dkms-nvidia-<version> once the module is built install the xdriver.
Warning:
Your /boot/grub2/grub.cfg will be rebuilt with the following options (these are modified in the /etc/default/grub file) 'rd.blacklist.nouveau nvidia-modeset=1'
You will need to reboot to enable the nvidia kernel modules.
As a side note it is now possible to boot the machine without the xdriver installed as modesetting reverts to vesa in the absence or non-detection of the driver
I have tested the nvidia-390 build and I am using it now while writing this post.
I have been unable to test the newer driver as I don’t have the necessary hardware so if somebody could test it and give feedback this would be most helpful.
Better still if someone has a redundant later graphics card that requires the 440 driver that they would like to donate…
Please give feedback
itchka
P.S.
I will make these drivers available in LX4.1 as soon as I have some feedback.
As far as I know, the drivers are ready and we have confirmation that they work well.
Unfortunately, I am unable to confirm their installation method (I do not have a nvidia card.) The best way to install drivers is to ask their maintainer: @Colin or wait for an official announcement.
I suspect (but that’s just my suspicion) that to install the drivers just activate the testing repository and then sudo dnf install nvidia-440
Post-edit: I moved these packages to updates repos.
Basically adding copy and paste commands to what @AngryPenguin posted. I think the current Lx 4.1 packages were built for kernel 5.5.4 and you would need to be logged in to that kernel to install these.
We need for @Colin to announce these and explain how they work. As I understood from watching them testing these user should just install these and reboot.
Ben,
Thank you for your instructions.
I confirm Nvidia driver works great if installed from shell as you suggested.
Unfortunately the presence in Dnfdragora of Nvidia drivers is misleading (and useless).
“just activate the testing repository” – I should be able to figure that out but maybe not.
I just acquired an HP Z400 tower, with an Nvidia card. I have identified and downloaded the correct driver. Just can’t find any specific instructions for installing it. I hope what you just gave me works.
Full disclosure: I do not currently have nvidia hardware. I have had it in the past.
It is in the instructions in this post above in this thread. In the command string the option --enablerepo rock-updates-x86_64-non-free tells dnf to use the non-free repo. This will only use non-free repo for this command and does not enable the non-free repo permanently.
So you have two choices either the 440 driver or 390 driver. Most likely one of them will work for you and most users. The 440 covers current hardware and 390 covers older “legacy” hardware. If you can post output of this command (on the computer with nvidia hardware):
$ inxi -G
If you don’t know which you need we will be happy to check. If either is appropriate you just install the driver and reboot.
One thing to be aware of is that nvidia proprietary drivers are kernel specific. That means a given nvidia package must go with the exact kernel version it is designed for.
In OM Lx 4.1 that won’t be a problem because there most probably will not be any more kernel upgrades. But something to be aware of going forward if you use these drivers. New kernel=new nvidia package or nvidia driver will not work. This is easy to deal with but users tend to forget this.
Post-edit: Hope this information is helpful. nvidia is one of the more difficult things we have to deal with in Linux. The company nVidia is arguably the least “Linux friendly” of all.
Welcome @Mytagen. Hoping you enjoy OpenMandriva Lx.
I don’t have nVidia hardware.
Not sure what you mean? As I understand things nvidia-settings is the nvidia control panel. So you installed one of the OpenMandriva nvidia packages and nvidia-settings is not in the application menu on your computer?
Remembering from when I did have nVidia hardware: One way to do this is to open Konsole and open nvidia-settings like this:
Don’t know how valid this test is but I installed nvidia-440 package in a VBox VM. There is no entry for nvidia-settings that I can find in Application Menu. When I try to launch nvidia-settings from Konsole I get
Cannot execute command: ‘nvidia-settings’.
Using sudo I get:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
[sudo] password for ben79:
sudo: nvidia-settings: command not found
That seems incorrect. if the modules package is needed it should install the modules for kernel-release-desktop and not install another unneeded kernel. But is this something happening because I tested in VBox VM?
However I don’t know if the lack of nvidia-settings is because it is missing from our package or if it won’t run because there is no nvidia hardware. So we really need some nvidia users to confirm or inform us of what they actually are seeing.
I also have been trying to get the Display Configuration
System Settings to recognize the NVIDIA drivers so it will allow higher resolution options than the sole 1024x768 currently available and hopefully the option to mirror dual monitors like I have set up on Zorin 15.3.
Thank you in advance for your efforts.
Could be wrong but I don’t recall that KDE/Plasma desktop SystemSettings5 has ever recognized nvidia proprietary drivers. That is why it is so important to have nvidia-settings which OpemMandriva’s nvidia driver packages are missing.
To be fair the OM nvidia -440 and nvidia-390 packages were as I recall introduced as “for testing” or “experimental”. Initially we did not get much feed back from community about these. So the person that builds these packages, @Colin, and I did not know till yesterday that nvida-settings was not present.
@Colin is working on this but he has a lot of other demands on his time lately away from OM so may take some days to get this, one never knows.
Looks like nvidia-settings is not part of the driver .rpm but is a separate package. I seem to remember having to install that some years ago when I had nvidia hardware.
Installing the X driver “should” pull in the nvidia dkms module.
Warning: