Checking for updates, I found an update for the Nvidia drivers this morning.
I installed it. Big mistake.
After installing that update, I rebooted. The “lightdm” login window was far too wide, so I knew something was wrong.
I logged into KDE/Plasma 5. The screen resolution was wrong. All windows were too big. Something crashed (I don’t remember, but it might have been plasma shell). I could not logout, so I had to use CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE (twice) to crash the system.
Fortunately, Icewm was usable. So I uninstalled the nvidia drivers and rebooted. KDE was still unusable. But this time, I could not even crash the system. I had to power off. I then reinstalled the drivers, in case that helped. It didn’t. The same problem.
I again uninstalled. Then I reinstalled xorg-x11-server and Mesa, Mesa-32bit, Mesa-libEGL1, Mesa-libGL1 (and the 32bit version of the last two), xf86-video-nouveau.
I probably didn’t have to reinstall all of those. In any case, the system is now running under nouveau (with XRender compositing). I think I’ll leave it that way. The G02 driver were great for 13.2, but never worked well with 42.1.
I do wonder why the uninstall of the G02 drivers did not automatically reinstall whatever needed to be reinstalled.
And another note: Although it worked after those reinstalls, something looked wrong during bootup. So I remade the “initrd”, which fixed that problem.
Hm.
The G02 driver hasn’t really been updated.
There only were some packaging changes to fix installation in SLE10 SP4 AFAICS.
The driver itself was not changed at all.
I probably didn’t have to reinstall all of those. In any case, the system is now running under nouveau (with XRender compositing). I think I’ll leave it that way. The G02 driver were great for 13.2, but never worked well with 42.1.
If nouveau works satisfactorily for you, that’s ok I suppose.
But if you want to investigate what the problem is, please install the driver again with zypper and post the output.
The Xorg log might be interesting as well.
I do wonder why the uninstall of the G02 drivers did not automatically reinstall whatever needed to be reinstalled.
When using the rpm packages, there should be no need to reinstall anything when removing them.
And another note: Although it worked after those reinstalls, something looked wrong during bootup. So I remade the “initrd”, which fixed that problem.
The initrd should be recreated automatically when uninstalling the nvidia packages too.
The one problem, is that the mouse cursor disappears and reboot is required to recover it.
I’ve set power settings in Plasma 5 to never switch off the display, to avoid that problem.
On the other hand, Gnome works with noveau. It did not work with the Nvidia G02 driver (in 42.1 – it was fine in 13.2).
But if you want to investigate what the problem is, please install the driver again with zypper and post the output.
The Xorg log might be interesting as well.
I had installed with Yast Software Manager. Perhaps there are Yast logs. I’d prefer to not repeat the whole thing.
When using the rpm packages, there should be no need to reinstall anything when removing them.
That obviously did not work out the way it was supposed to.
The initrd should be recreated automatically when uninstalling the nvidia packages too.
Based on the time stamp of the file, it had been regenerated when install the packages, but not when uninstalling.
I just asked Yast to delete three packages. I don’t think I can control the order in which it deletes them (unless I do multiple runs – but even multiple runs probably wouldn’t work because of dependencies.
The messages during package installation/deinstallation should be in /var/log/zypp/history.
No.
But the order might have been “wrong”, i.e. x11-video-nvidiaG02 might have been uninstalled (and mkinitrd run) before uninstalling nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-default.
/var/log/zypp/history should show that as well (or YaST->Software Management’s “History”).
I’m not sure if that could be “fixed” on a package level though (the uninstallation case in particular), except maybe by putting the calls to mkinitrd into the kmp package…