Nvidia video drivers

After an upgrade from 42.3 I am having trouble getting the video right. The m/c has an old Nvidia card that used the G02 drivers but now I have low resolution and it characters. Which packages no need from the nvidia repo?

NVidia dropped support for the G02 (304.xxx) driver half a year ago:
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3142/~/support-timeframes-for-unix-legacy-gpu-releases

It is no longer available in the repo.

If you had it installed, remove all nvidia packages, and hopefully the opensource nouveau driver will work fine.

You should still be able to download the .run installer from nvidia’s home page and try to install it “the hard way”, but I have no idea whether it will work on Leap 15.0.

PS: What exact card model is it?
Just to check whether you really would need the G02 driver.

Think it is GeForce 6100 nForce 640

Thank you for the information about nvidia support. I had not seen that; looks like progress.

Actually I had uninstalled the G02 drivers as part of an attempt to fix and it started working OK but it is good to know that that was the right thing to do.

All that remains is that while booting it displays a question mark in a shield(?) which does not really indicate it is booting. I am sure there must be a command-line option to the boot to show the text i get if I type esc. Looking at man pages it is not clear to me what I should change. Currently it says


splash=silent quiet showopts

By the way, yast2 crashed when looking at the bootloader options (repeatably) so I looked directly at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Unfortunately, that is no longer supported by NVidia, or their later drivers.

Actually I had uninstalled the G02 drivers as part of an attempt to fix and it started working OK but it is good to know that that was the right thing to do.

So your system is actually working fine now with nouveau?
Then just stick to it, I’d say (unless you want to experiment).

Btw, you should at least try to install Mesa-dri-nouveau despite of the warning.
It’s necessary for hardware OpenGL/3D acceleration, and definitely worth having unless it does cause problems.

One particular problem that led to instating this warning was that QtWebEngine (used by KDEPIM e.g.) constantly crashed with nouveau due to limitations/bugs in the driver (that still haven’t been fixes AFAIK).
But OTOH, openSUSE did patch QtWebEngine when that problem first turned up, to fall back to software rendering with nouveau to avoid these crashes.

All that remains is that while booting it displays a question mark in a shield(?) which does not really indicate it is booting. I am sure there must be a command-line option to the boot to show the text i get if I type esc.

This is plymouth’s text mode splash screen, the ‘?’ indicate that the text mode console has not been setup to support UTF8.
A problem that seems to occur on some systems (never seen it here), there are other threads about it and the reason or a solution has not been found yet AFAIK.
Mainly cosmetical though.

And plymouth meanwhile wouldn’t work at all with the nvidia driver anyway…

By the way, yast2 crashed when looking at the bootloader options (repeatably) so I looked directly at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

We had such a problem discussed here already.
It apparently can be caused by a “broken” /etc/default/grub file.
Can you post it?

We had such a problem discussed here already.
It apparently can be caused by a “broken” /etc/default/grub file.
Can you post it?


GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="false"
GRUB_TERMINAL="gfxterm"
GRUB_TIMEOUT="8"
GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK="n"
GRUB_GFXMODE="auto"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=
GRUB_DEFAULT="saved"
SUSE_BTRFS_SNAPSHOT_BOOTING="true"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=/dev/disk/by-uuid/d8a8d215-0251-4d31-af5d-
665b4cb9d8f0 splash=silent quiet showopts"
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT="vga=gfx-1024x768x16"

All that remains is that while booting it displays a question mark in a shield(?) which does not really indicate it is booting.

See the Plymouth section for one “solution”: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way