I'm excited for solus' return, but after I installed the updates yesterday, my screen stays black. I'm on an old latitude e6420 with an nvs 4200m, so I was surprised when I saw Nvidia updating on the app store as the latest driver my GPU can use was a 390 one.

During the outage I left my computer with a minimal install, so I tried to reinstall Solus and managed to get it working with the 4.2 iso. I did a eopkg up, restarted, and had no issues.

I installed Nvidia drivers through doflicky, restarted, and again got a black screen. I can access a terminal through alt+F4.

    ReillyBrogan Doflicky has the 390 appear and when this machine was using windows it also suggested and installed the 390 driver. It seems strange to me that 470 driver would suddenly be backwards compatible with my hardware.

    I would like to attempt it as I enjoy running Solus on this machine, but is there an optimal way to install that specific driver on Solus?

      bleh so I was surprised when I saw Nvidia updating on the app store as the latest driver my GPU can use was a 390 one.

      You'll get driver updates with every kernel update as they have to be rebuild for every version.

      bleh I installed Nvidia drivers through doflicky, restarted, and again got a black screen. I can access a terminal through alt+F4.

      I'd check which Nvidia driver is installed with eopkg li | grep nvidia (unless you already know) , then sudo eopkg rm the nvidia driver packages. After a reboot Solus should use the nouveau drivers again.

      If after that you could change what driver version doflicky recommends to you, that would be great.
      It should offer you the nvidia-390-glx-driver (at least the Nvidia website lists that one as the only supported). If it does anything else then that's a bug.

      edit: Okay, so you got the 390 driver as per your above message. That should be the right one. Can you confirm that you're actually booting into the newest kernel? (uname -a)

      • bleh replied to this.

            Staudey Yeah, grep Nvidia shows 390 32 bit, 390 common, and 390 current, along with the store's modaliases.
            uname -a shows 6.2.14-232.current

                bleh Oh yeah, now that I look at it it seems the 390 driver is having issues with kernel 6.2.

                Currently building a patched version.

                  Okay, so the patched version seems to work for now, but we'll probably have to get rid of the 390 driver series sooner or later (support only lasted until the end of 2022). To be completely honest this somewhat slipped my mind (I thought it was 2023 before I checked)

                  edit: The patch will be part of the next sync. Not sure yet if that will be Friday or we will have an earlier sync (as there is also a fix for samba in the works)

                  • bleh replied to this.

                    Staudey Ok, I had no idea. It is 2023. Nvidia did end support for my GPU in 2022. The Nvidia 390 driver, Fermi architecture, nvs gpus have been deprecated. The only way to use a modern os on this machine is with open source drivers.

                    I was confused because my system all of a sudden stopped working. Would be neat if updates would automatically uninstall deprecated drivers or would push a notice to uninstall the proprietary 390 driver.

                        : bleh thanks for the heads up and sorry you had to guinea pig.
                        I require the 390s also and I have a deprecated gpu.

                        "I was confused because my system all of a sudden stopped working."
                        you want to hear something really weird---because I get the weird ones all the time. I am one week into a new Budgie install and I installed via Doflicky the 390s as it suggested. That was 2 days ago.
                        I looked today after reading your thread and the install didn't stick. Doflicky is still offering me 390s. I am running Nouveaus. Don't ask how a package uninstalls itself I don't want to know🙂. Don't think it came with the nvidia-smi package though but so far I can live with Nouveau till the stork dumps a sack of cash over my house when the mobo fails the rabbit test...to mangle metaphors.

                        • bleh replied to this.

                            bleh I was confused because my system all of a sudden stopped working. Would be neat if updates would automatically uninstall deprecated drivers or would push a notice to uninstall the proprietary 390 driver.

                            You misunderstand. When we actually get rid of the nvidia-390-glx-driver we will of course automatically uninstall it, so it falls back to the nouveau driver. This was not the intention yet, and the driver simply happened to not work with kernel 6.2 even though we had applied a patch that was supposed to fix that. With the new patch it should work properly again (until we get rid of the driver altogether).

                            • bleh replied to this.

                                Hi,
                                It might helpful information that since that update, I used to boot into the 6.1.x (likely the last provided) kernel where the graphics still worked. Unfortunately, removed that one from boot manager and found that also the LTS kernel did go to black screen. Running lenovo T420s with the same NVS4200M card (which is still in use thanks to Solus, BTW).

                                Luckily, thanks @bleh for asking exactly this and @Staudey for providing a solution!