Black screen after installing a GTX 750

Hi,

I’ve been using OpenSUSE 13.1 for about a month now with the Intel 4400 iGPU. Today I installed a GTX 750 and I keep getting a black screen.
After booting for the 1st time, I installed the NVidia drivers as described here(in recovery mode), but then there was an error message that was showing up for a very brief time (less than a second) on the screen before it to turn black. I haven’t done anything but the message stopped showing and I only had one chance to film it and take a screen capture from my phone (sorry for the bad quality). Here is the screenshot : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78906691/Screenshot_2014-09-22-16-11-41.png

I also have Windows 8 installed and everything works perfectly/ How can I fix?

Thanks

How exactly did you install the nvidia driver? Did you use the 1-click install?
Please post a list of all kernel/nvidia packages you have on your system now:

rpm -qa | egrep "(kernel|nvidia)"

The error message you get now looks like this:
http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/501096-NVIDIA-Optimus-not-working-(again)-after-nvidia-bumblebee-update
But as I understand it that’s a problem with the latest nvidia driver version.
The one in the repo has not been changed since over a month, so it should work.

One thing you could/should try though is to disable the embedded intel graphics chip in the BIOS settings.
I have heard of problems with the nvidia driver when this is enabled.

Thanks for your reply. I just realized that I cannot access the recovery mode, I get a “oh no! something went wrong” message. I also tried the rescue mode from a bootable USB stick, but it also shows a blank screen.
How options do I have now?

And yes, I used the one click install method.

Boot to command line is one option/ Press e at boot find line starting with linux go to the complete end of that line (note it is long and wraps) enter a space and then 3 press F10 to boot. You an run yast from the command line just log in as root and type yast

From the error message you run gnome. So log to a different desktop (assuming you are not auto logging on). Gnome does not like the generic drivers that you get in rescue mode.

Not quite.
GNOME would work just well with Mesa’s software renderer that is used in recovery mode, but the installed nvidia driver breaks Mesa completely by replacing the GL libraries.

IceWM should work though and should be installed by default.

You could of course remove the nvidia packages again and use GNOME in recovery mode, but this won’t help in finding out why the nvidia driver doesn’t work for you. And it would of course mean degraded performance, as GNOME unconditionally uses OpenGL and Mesa’s software renderer instead of hardware acceleration then.

So maybe run something like this first (either in text mode or in IceWM) to redirect the output I requested to a file, and then post the content of the file:

rpm -qa | egrep "(kernel|nvidia)" > packagelist.txt

Have you tried to disable the intel chip?

PS, I nearly forgot:
You probably use gdm as login manager, this won’t work either now, just as GNOME.
So login to text mode, run the above to get that output, then run yast as gogalthorp suggested, and remove all packages with “nvidia” in the name.

You should be able to get a working GNOME in recovery mode at least again.

Then run the following in gnome-terminal and post the output:

sudo zypper in -f nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop x11-video-nvidiaG03 nvidia-computeG03 nvidia-glG03

If the driver works then, great, if not you can of course remove it again.

Well I’m still getting a black screen when I do that. I took two pictures (with different qualities) so you can see the message I get, the screen turns blank right after.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78906691/Screenshot_2014-09-22-19-17-06.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78906691/Screenshot_2014-09-22-19-21-03.png

I can’t find the option to disable the iGPU. The closest parameter I found was the one deciding whether it should use the PCI-e port or the integrated HDMI first. I’ll look again though.
Any idea why the command line doesn’t work?

Well, that message says that you should remove the “VGA” parameter from the kernel command line because it is deprecated. But this should not cause any problem.

Any idea why the command line doesn’t work?

It should work when you boot to recovery mode. Only GNOME will not work.
When you get that error message from gdm/GNOME, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to text mode and login.
Then get that package list, remove the nvidia driver and GNOME should work again in recovery mode.

Then try to re-install the driver as I posted above, and post the output.

I’m unable to access the command line. The message I showed you appears for about a second, then I get that blank screen again, and Ctrl+Alt+F1 doesn’t do anything, or at least I can’t see the result as there is nothing on the screen.

In recovery mode as well?

I thought you get a GNOME error screen in recovery mode, not a black screen.
Or does the screen turn black when you switch to text mode?

Try to press ‘e’ at the boot menu, search for the line starting with “linux”, remove the “vga=xxx” to get rid of the error message, and append “nomodeset” to the end. Then press ‘F10’ to boot.
Can you switch to text mode then? (GNOME will still not work of course)

OK I’ve been able to get that list. Here it is


kernel-desktop-3.11.6-4.1.x86_64
kernel-desktop-3.11.10-21.1.x86_64
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop-304.121_k3.11.6_4-37.1.x86_64
x11-video-nvidiaG02-304.121-38.1.x86_64
kernel-desktop-devel-3.11.10-21.1.x86_64
nvidia-computeG02-304.121-38.1.x86_64
kernel-devel-3.11.10-21.1.noarch

I’m now going to remove the nvidia package and install the ones you mentioned.

Well, you installed the G02 driver, which is probably too old for a GTX 750 (no, this is no GeForce 7… :wink: )
Nvidia’s homepage only lists cards up to GTX 6xx (GeForce 600 series) as supported by the 304.xxx driver.

Remove it as I said already and at least recovery mode should work.
Either use YaST to remove the 3 nvidia driver packages, or run:

sudo rpm -e nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop x11-video-nvidiaG02 nvidia-computeG02

Then try to install the G03 driver instead, with the zypper line I gave you before.

sudo zypper in -f nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop x11-video-nvidiaG03 nvidia-computeG03 nvidia-glG03

Hmm it still doesn’t work. Here is the screen I get at startup : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78906691/DSC_0105.jpg
The recovery mode still shows the same error, and here is the output of your command now:


kernel-desktop-3.11.6-4.1.x86_64kernel-desktop-3.11.10-21.1.x86_64
nvidia-glG03-340.32-31.1.x86_64
nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop-340.32_k3.11.6_4-31.1.x86_64
nvidia-computeG03-340.32-31.1.x86_64
kernel-desktop-devel-3.11.10-21.1.x86_64
x11-video-nvidiaG03-340.32-31.1.x86_64
nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop-340.32_k3.11.6_4-31.1.x86_64
kernel-devel-3.11.10-21.1.noarch

This might be the same issue I advised another user about a while back;
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/499962-Black-screen-after-installing-nvidia-driver?p=2656643#post2656643

That’s plymouth, the boot splash, running in text mode.
Strange, as it should show a graphics.
This leads me to a thought though.

Try to disable plymouth, by pressing ‘e’ at the boot menu and appending “plymouth.enable=0” to the line starting with “linux”, then press ‘F10’ to boot.
If you still only get to text mode, do the following please:

  • edit the file /etc/sysconfig/kernel with a text editor (“sudo pico /etc/sysconfig/kernel” e.g.)
  • Set NO_KMS_IN_INITRD=“yes”
  • save it
  • then run “sudo /sbin/mkinitrd”

Hopefully it works then.

The recovery mode still shows the same error

Yes, that’s to be expected.
GNOME will never run in recovery mode when the nvidia driver is installed.

and here is the output of your command now:

That looks ok, but did you get any errors when installing the driver?

Thanks it worked ! Blacklisting the iGPU did the trick.

Good to hear! :slight_smile:

I did suggest to disable the intel graphics, but I forgot about the blacklist thing which is the only way if you cannot disable the GPU in the BIOS.

Thanks to Miuku for jumping in… :wink:

That said, I’m still getting a command line interface at startup. It’s not a huge deal though. As I have an SSD the computer starts in just a few seconds.

Sorry, I don’t quite understand that.
If you only get text mode on startup, how is that better because the computer starts fast?

So, to have this clear: you only get to text mode, but can start a graphical session just fine then?
Then maybe only the default boot target is set wrong.

You can change that in YaST->System->Services Manager, it should be “runlevel5” or “graphical”.
Or use “systemctl get-default” to see what is set, and f.e. “systemctl set-default graphical.target” to set it correctly.