GTX 980M and black screen as soon as Nvidia drivers are installed

dv-longinus

Hi All,

I am facing a very strange issue on a Clevo laptop :

I tried every flavour of Solus but as soon as the Nvidia drivers are installed and loaded, I get a black screen.
Tried to reboot.
Using the Nvidia Optimus Manager to use the hybrid mode gets me back to the desktop, nut the Nvidia car is not listed when using xrandr --listproviders

Only the intel card is listed.

It works fine on other distro (Ubuntu 18.04 and flavour, 20.04 and flavours, Linux mint etc...)

It seems that xserver cannot initialise the when the nvidia drivers are loaded.

Could it be a bug in xserver (Solus is using version 1.20.7, Ubuntu 20.04 is using 1.20.8)?

Kernel bug?

I had to move to Ubuntu Mate quickly as My father wanted to use his laptop...

I tried all the driver (beta, stable, dev) same problem.

No problem at all when trying the different drivers on other distro)

Thank you in advance.

DataDrake

How are you installing the driver? Doesn't sound like you are using Hardware Drivers aka DoFlicky from the menu.

dv-longinus

DataDrake

I used Hardware Drivers, aka DoFlicky in the menu to install the drivers (installed the 32 bit drivers as well).

Solus works fine on my gtx 1060 max-q, but not with the gtx 980M.

Staudey

Did you perform a full update of system-packages too? So we can rule out an outdated package ruining everything.
Could you try running eopkg li | grep nvidia after installing the drivers with DoFlicky and copy the output here, so we can see what packages it actually did install.

dv-longinus

Staudey

This is what I did each time :

Installed Solus OS then fully updated the system -> rebooted.

Then I installed the nvidia drivers.

dv-longinus

$ eopkg li | grep nvidia
nvidia-390-glx-driver-modaliases            - These files are used by the Software Center for hardware detection
nvidia-glx-driver-32bit                     - 32-bit libraries for nvidia-glx-driver
nvidia-glx-driver-common                    - Shared assets for the NVIDIA GLX Driver
nvidia-glx-driver-current                   - NVIDIA Binary Driver (Current Kernel)
nvidia-glx-driver-modaliases                - These files are used by the Software Center for hardware detection

dv-longinus

It seems that everything is properly installed.

What could prevent the GPU from working on Solus when it work fine on other distro with the same drivers?

dv-longinus

which logs should I check to find relevant information on why I get a black screen when the drivers are installed?

kuki

What is your DE? I have sometimes problem with lightdm(budgie) when I switch with optimus manager to nvidia I have randomly black screen than I have to kill lightdm and than system boot normal

dv-longinus

kuki

On this laptop it is with all DE (Plasma, Mate, Gnome, Budgie).

Even when using optimus manager, I can't manage to get the nvidia GPU to work.

However it works fine on other distro.

So there is something specific to Solus that create this issue.

dv-longinus

Let see if the update today is going to help with this issue.

hawk4861776b

Did it help? I have the same issue with solus 4.1.

I don't really understand why nvidia gpu doesn't work even if I correctly installed everything just like you did.
However I did notice that solus 4.1 pre-installed some amdgpu drivers but I am unable to say whether or not I need them.

Anyone has the solution for this problem? Nvidia drivers doesn't work properly and cause the black screen when booting?

Staudey

hawk4861776b How did you install the nvidia drivers?

hawk4861776b

Staudey using doflicky

Staudey

hawk4861776b So you installed Solus, did a full system update, and then installed the nvidia drivers via doflicky and restarted?

hawk4861776b

Staudey yup