I now have a need to use external projects a lot on my laptop so I decided to turn off optimus and uninstall bumblebee etc and work with just the Nvidia drivers.

Installed v331 updates via the ‘additional drivers’ thing (Ubuntu) and it’ll boot to the login screen then freeze up. Googling returns thousands of different instances of the same symptoms with different causes.. the log file contains something about some queue overflowing.

Any ideas? I’m going mad.

Sometimes you do realise that windows is actually rather good.

Sigh… yes.. there are reasons for this madness though.

Nvidia is you promplem..

NWS
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ[/video]

Sometimes you do realise that windows is actually rather good.

Yes it is, and has plenty of its own driver issues, just the same!

Yeah but suppliers work on the assumption that their hardware has to work well with Windows. They don’t really give a sh*t about us geeks…!

If you depend on your laptop for work and need linux, then why not flog the one you have and get something which works? THere are machines that ‘just work’ from cheap Chromebooks to an XPS13.

I had problems with a Pavilion (not as bad as yours, I could at least get it to work after editing the boot config etc) related to switching between ATI and Intel graphics, massive battery drain etc. Noticed after a recent reinstall that it’s pretty much sorted under the latest kernel but that doesn’t help you now.

It’s work’s laptop and whilst I could buy my own, I can’t afford (nor do I want) to spend £1,000 on a laptop that’ll run what I need. The reason I don’t want to use Windows is because I’d then have to use PGP and that’s so bad it effectively prevents use of hibernate which is company policy.

However, the more this goes on the more likely I am to go back to Windows. I just need to be able to use a projector now and again… which did mostly work using a hacked script and Optimus, but not with many of the projectors at this client’s office.

Anyway I am now on kernel 3.15 and I tried drivers 304 – that worked for about 5 mins then boom, I couldn’t even reboot. FFS, unreliable heap of shit Nvidia drivers.

What do you need to run? For me, a linuxed C720 works fine with a projector and IWB drivers, cost less than 200 quid. Granted, I had to install wine to run some crappy etext software which I try to avoid doing but like you I depend on it for work and refuse to install Windows.

Lots of software. All at once. I’m not going to replace a i7 with 1.5TB of storage and 32GB ram with a Chromebook.

It’s not an option, trust me.

The latest version on the Nvidia driver web page is more recent than 331 – it’s 340 or 343.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

You will need to install it by hand, but it’s not that difficult.

Seems likely that it’s something to do with the fact I was using Intel drivers.. so there’s something Intel related that’s not been purged and is still trying to be run.

Having said that just removed and reinstalled X and it got a little further, but it’s frozen again. Some kind of event queue within X is filling up it seems.

Check Phoronix. Failing that, ask on the Tomshardware forums. Worth looking at Anandtech too.

Can’t you run software drivers? What are you actually doing that needed a hardware driver? Ubuntu supports multiple displays at different resolutions using software drivers on all the machines I’ve ever tried it on.

What’s the hardware?

NVIDIA TDR driver issues made me actually scrap my GeForce 470.

AMD all the way. Hurry up, Captain Jack!

molgrips – Member

I now have a need to use external projects a lot on my laptop so I decided to turn off optimus and uninstall bumblebee etc and work with just the Nvidia drivers.

Installed v331 updates via the ‘additional drivers’ thing (Ubuntu) and it’ll boot to the login screen then freeze up. Googling returns thousands of different instances of the same symptoms with different causes.. the log file contains something about some queue overflowing.

Any ideas? I’m going mad.

What is actually in the log file? ‘Something about some queue overflowing’ could be a few things!

TheBrick – Member

Yes it is, and has plenty of its own driver issues, just the same!

No, not the same. Remind me of the last time Microsoft broke binary compatibility on a stable kernel series?

Also what happens if your graphics driver crashes on Windows? Desktop restarts in seconds, applications still running, work still open. Linux? Forget it, X has shit itself, all running apps gone, work dissapeared, oh and why not corrupt your gnome profile as well so that all your preferences get reset. Load of toss.

Lots of software. All at once. I’m not going to replace a i7 with 1.5TB of storage and 32GB ram with a Chromebook.

Why not get a Thinkpad T series, one of the most linux compatible laptops? In fact I triple boot 8.1, OSX Yosemite and Ubuntu on mine.

This guide worked for me in a round about manner;

How to install the latest Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

I had similar problems with Ubuntu freezing up at login. After getting myself into a terminal and purging the offending driver I had downloaded I then reinstalled from a trusted repository. I still managed to get into a whole package dependency nightmare on another Ubuntu install with AMD propriety drivers. I nuked that one and just used the Mesa OSS drivers after that which worked well enough for my needs.

I agree with retro83, Windows is technically more mature in many areas and often worth using unless your politics dictate that ‘free software’ is a must – fortunately work is all SQL Server and .Net so few Linux shenanigans there 🙂

Two laptops.

One to run Linux, for whatever reason and the other a simple Windows one for all the usual stuff.

It’s work’s laptop and whilst I could buy my own, I can’t afford (nor do I want) to spend £1,000 on a laptop that’ll run what I need. The reason I don’t want to use Windows is because I’d then have to use PGP and that’s so bad it effectively prevents use of hibernate which is company policy.

And aren’t you a Contractor – how does this fit with your client vs insurance?

I wasn’t suggesting a chromebook, just saying that you wouldn’t necessarily need to spend a grand. What’s your hourly rate? And how long have you been messing around with video drivers? Might be time to cut your losses!

Why doesn’t it work with the on board graphics by the way?

We have all the questions and none of the answers.

MOLLY?!?! Where are you I needs* to know.

*OK, I am in procrastinating mode again.

I really hate Optimus. It’s a terrible solution to a not very big problem and causes all sorts of shit.

I had a work laptop once that had Optimus. I could get the Intel and the Nvidia cards to work (even at the same time), but only on the internal panel. The Nvidia card handled HDMI, but didn’t want to recognise it. Supposedly the display port worked, but none of the monitors in the office had it.

I’d rather (and now do) use Intel graphics in a laptop. It’s not like I do anything that requires a decent 3d card anyway – but sounds like you might do.

Actually, Molgrips – why not just reinstall the OS?

I have Mint running on this thing with the NVIDIA drivers accelerating* this GeForce 8400M GS even though the chipset is on the way out [one SATA link is MIA].

Works OK.

Oh, and while Windows may not have broken the kernal/graphics links – they sure as hell break lots of other things. Every time I look at theregister there’s another story of a Patch Tuesday disaster.

O/T:
Seeing as people keep talking about Cinnamon and system requirements – anyone got any tips for reducing the overhead? This Turion laptop is pretty laggy running Mint/Cinnamon. I turned off the window animations, but I’m not sure it makes much difference.

*LOL

From Slashdot, today

If you ever want to see just how bad nvidia is in Linux, get a laptop that has their Optimus abortion. My laptop at work regrettably has that.
With stock Intel drivers, display works but there’s no acceleration, so performance is shit.
With stock nvidia or nouveau drivers, performance is great but can’t use external monitors (because they are tied to the Intel chip)

Getting both working at once required a kernel built from source, a backported package from the testing build, a package from a PPA from a child distro, three dependencies built from source because of conflicts between the distro packages and the bleeding edge kernel I had to use, and the nightmare that is bumblebee. I don’t dare run an update on this system because **** knows what will break.

Meanwhile, my last three laptops at home have been AMD-based. Install Catalyst, reboot, everything is beautiful. It is remarkable how far things have swung. I remember AMD being verboten back when I first got into linux because of how godawful the support was.

I know that this driver works, I’m pretty sure this is how it was working when I initially installed it and I switched to Intel for batery life.

I think it must be something I’ve done since the initial install causing it since it was similar with both 304 and 331. I need to go check what’s in the startup scripts.

Oh, and while Windows may not have broken the kernal/graphics links – they sure as hell break lots of other things. Every time I look at theregister there’s another story of a Patch Tuesday disaster.

That serves anyone right for not properly testing – regardless of OS 🙂

I had to deal with one client’s SQL Servers which were in a right state. This was strange because I knew their Oracle systems on RHEL were well managed. It turns out that all they needed to do was start treating their MS estate with the same operational & security procedures as their *nix estate and the problems would never have happened.

Disabled the touchpad on a hunch because I thought I remembered it from a previous log, rebooted and it got to the login page but froze up after I logged in. Mouse pointer moved for a minute or so then *disappeared* rather than froze.

Nothing in Xorg log about an error, nothing in kern.log that I can see – where else to look? Previous messages about queues overflowing could be a red herring…

Reinstalled the OS. Works now.

Awsum. Can you return the favor and tell me why the hell I can’t get this Xeon stable at 4GHz please?

Is this the one you bought bargain bin?

FFS. Limited choice with an i7 with 1.5TB of storage and 32GB ram???!!!!???

Windows 8.1 with as many Linux virtual machines as you like.

Why not get a Thinkpad T series, one of the most linux compatible laptops? In fact I triple boot 8.1, OSX Yosemite and Ubuntu on mine.

Just want to jump in on this and say that it is no longer true – I have a T440p with optimus and it is terrible (Randomly crashes corrupting whatever is in memory and also files on drives – really catastophic failure see here if interested). I’ve had to completely disable the Nvidia card using a kernel module which does some ACPI magic and use just intel graphics.

A bit sad because I only have the discrete card so I can CUDA and I can’t do that any more for fear of my hard drive being destroyed.

Whilst we’re comparing Optimus anecdotes,

Work laptop is a Lenovo running W7. I entered into a train of thought where I wanted to use the Nvidia chip at all times rather than the Intel integrated graphics pish, and didn’t like the not knowing which processor was doing the heavy lifting. So, I disabled Optimus in BIOS and forced it over the the Nvidia card.

Windows postively shat itself, BSoDs and random instability, a driver uninstall / reinstall hell. In the end I gave in and reverted it back to “well, you sort it out then” and it’s been right as rain ever since.

I know very little about how it works, but it smells hackish to me.

Awsum. Can you return the favor and tell me why the hell I can’t get this Xeon stable at 4GHz please?

That’s a shame, what have you bumped the voltage to?

I have done much work in the last hour.

I’m testing really heavily though, not easy stability testing…

The thread is here….

…for those sufficiently geeky.

FFS. Limited choice with an i7 with 1.5TB of storage and 32GB ram???!!!!???

Windows 8.1 with as many Linux virtual machines as you like.

W8 isn’t approved for work.

I do use lots of VMs (that’s why I have 32Gb ram) and the host OS was W7 but we also have to use PGP whole disk encryption which is incredibly slow to hibernate, but hibernate is necessarywhen you leave your PC because it’s not secure in sleep mode. I got fed up of waiting 20 mins for it to un-hibernate so I thought I’d experiment with Linux and learn a bit. Still learning.. but it’s become my white whale.

So, I disabled Optimus in BIOS and forced it over the the Nvidia card.

Yea I was surprised to discover the same thing – the Nvidia driver for Windows only seems to work with Optimus.

W8 isn’t approved for work.

This is ridiculous, how long does an OS need to be out for? I hated PGP disk encryption on Win 7 too, I don’t blame you for trying to avoid it.

Windows 8.1, Bitlocker and Hyper-V are in my opinion a much better platform than what I had before for my work laptop.

I’ll just add in totally unhelpful fashion the fact that dell precisions work nicely with linux (you can even sometimes buy them with it pre-installed) but optimus best avoided.

Not helpful to the OP I know though, but I feel your pain – we use the precisions precisely to avoid it (if requirements are a boatload of compute and linux compatibility the options are very few and far between!).

This is ridiculous,

Tell me about it.

Machine’s running pretty warm with the nvidia card, and battery has gone down from about 6 hours to about 4 I reckon. Since I reinstalled and cleverly did not back up some of my scripts I cannot remember how to get the backlight to dim when I unplug the power. And I can’t get the fan to shut up either but that may be down to a throbbing hunk of GPU that’s now come to life.

There wouldn’t be anything wrong with Optimus if they’d wired the external display ports to the integrated card, OR if they could be bothered to pull their fingers out and write appropriate drivers.

I do enjoy these threads – it’s like a teach yourself a foreign language cd 😀

Mostly what I’ve learnt is to stay away from linux

(although, if they bring out a distro 🙄 called despair, I might try that)

I may switch to the officially supported Redhat image at this rate.