That may be the problem. Having now time to look at things I’ve been trying to get to grips with nvidia-settings. I rebooted with nouveau blacklisted, which I assumed would load the nVidia driver then tried running nividia-settings. To my surprise it told me that the nVidia driver wasn’t loaded. So lord knows what I had configured.n And no wonder things aren’t making sense.
Previously, an era or two ago, with earlier versions of openSuse, I installed the nVidia driver using the instructions in NVIDIA the hard way. It would be nice to have the Nvidia driver installed as part of the upgrade and that is what I thought I did. But apparently not.
So do I have to explicitly install the driver using zypper now? Advice please?
(Sorry if this is coming across as all very stupid, but my focus is on other things these days.)
You do not have to. You can install it using whatever method you are comfortable with. But I expect that today more users are familiar with using packages from SUSE.
Thanks. As I replied, I did that when you first suggested it. I have repeated the exercise, to no avail. I also installed a reference to NVidia firmware, which seemed to have no effect. I’ve now removed thta.
However, the result of my fiddling about is that my screen size has gone to 1024x768 even when using nouveau, instead of the 1920x1015. In other words, I’m back where I started instead of the screen size being usable when nouveau is not blacklisted.
Note: there are display resolution settings in each desktop. If you are on kde just do a search for “display” in the app start/search box. Set to resolution you wish.
That only works on non-broken installations. 1024x768 is the typical result of using fallback drivers fbdev or vesa instead of nvidia, modesetting and/or nouveau.
When messing with NVidia GPU configuration, brokenness is typical. There is no simple switching between FOSS and proprietary drivers. For FOSS drivers to work, all traces of any NVidia proprietary driver installation must be completely purged. Doing so usually requires following the instructions packaged with the NVidia installer, or reinstalling the packages whose components NVidia installation touched. It may be that FOSS currently isn’t working because of files created by the NVidia installer in /etc/X11/xorg.con* that must be removed.
Well that’s got me back to where I was this morning. So thanks! I can now at least do the work I was planning to do tomorrow
The next step has got to be ideas for how I can test out my system with a working nVidia proprietor driver. That was what worked for my games under LEAP 15.0 and I’d really like to see if I can get a better performance under LEAP 15.3 than I do with nouveau.
But thanks to all who have contributed so far. I’ve learned a lot.
You could start with actually showing us what you did. Step by step, with complete protocol of all commands you executed and their output.
Did to do what? I’ve done a lot of things over the last fortnight. I ended up with a broken installation, as @mrmazda described it, after doing an incremental upgrade vie the net as described on the website (on a page I don’t seem to be able to find now). But mostly, once I got myself in trouble I followed various instructions given on this thread.
A new install sounds rather like a sledge hammer to crack a nut, given that, for most things, the system is working perfectly. The only thing that doesn’t work is what the ultra-fans of FOSS are saying I shouldn’t do anyway - try to use the nVidia driver. But we have a problem that wasn’t a problem under LEAP 15.0, and that’s what I’d like to sort out, preferably by knowing what has caused it, rather than by hoping things will turn out differently the second time we do it.
I appreciate it must be frustrating trying to help when you can’t see what’s precisely going on, but that’s the nature of a support forum. It’s why I always appreciate help with debugging. And that way, by trying to debug the problem, we learn how not to have it happen again.
So you want to install the nvidia (closed source) driver now?
You mentioned in 15.0 you installed it the “hard way”. That’s not necessary for current drivers. You can use the nvidia repository. I don’t remember if you have it installed. Using YaST I have always considered installing the driver extremely easy. AFAIK YaST sorts everything out required to eliminate nouveau. Even vice versa worked fine for me. The good thing, YaST also runs in terminal if GUI is totally borked. If you are using BTRFS you may also make a note of your latest snapshot before doing such installs. So you can rollback directly without the need of search in case of trouble.
Please reply if you want to try and need advice.
Of course it can be done in terminal with zypper if you prefer that.
Thanks for the reply. I have loaded the NVIDIA driver modules, initially using the openSuse OS update and then using both YAST and zypper after removing them, from the NVIDIA repo. Doing it this way automatically adds a .conf file that contains the instruction to blacklist nouveau. The result is the problem that has been identified, that the driver is borked and the screen size comes out at 1024x768, with no method of changing it.
I suspect that there is some sort of problem with how YAST handles the installation of the driver since, when I think I’ve installed the NVIDIA driver and I have blacklisted nouveau, running nvidia-settings gets the response the the NVIDIA driver is not installed. Which accounts for why it isn’t working. That’s why I was wondering whether to manually install the driver.
If I recall correctly, things seemed to run okay up to and including LEAP 15.2. It was when I installed LEAP 15.3 that things went wrong.
Well, now I have reread the whole thread and yes, apparently you have installed the nvidia driver and and as has been mentioned before, nobody actually knows what happened. I’m actually not sure if you now have nVdia driver installed or not. “Installed” doesn’t actually mean loaded.
Your /var/log/Xorg.0.log contains:
1. 52.515] (EE) NVIDIA: Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module. Please see the
1. 52.515] (EE) NVIDIA: system's kernel log for additional error messages and
1. 52.515] (EE) NVIDIA: consult the NVIDIA README for details.
So it is/was there but failed to load. What we have not seen is a kernel log unless I missed that. A “dmesg | grep nvidia” might have shed some light. But that only makes sense if the driver is installed and there’s an attempt to load it.
However, after all that fiddling I tend to agree with arvidjaar that a clean install might be the best.
