unable to use" Install driver" app to install drivers.

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

firenice03

I may try that later. I'm kind of done for now.

****************

Șerban
It looks like I didn't realize about the kernel issue. Its a shame. Maybe someday nouveau will be better. but now It is just not stable enough and does not perform where I would need it.

[Şerban S.]

[...]Maybe someday nouveau will be better. [...]

It sure will.
I have a NVidia GK107 (GeForce GT630 OEM) with 2 GB of RAM DDR3. I could install the NVidia driver, but... Nothing really improved compared to Nouveau driver. Even worse: video rendering, lost about 3 - 5 FPS with the proprietary driver. Maybe it is a video-software related issue, up to some point. Anyway, with Nouveau, I could use the video card without side-effects: screen-tearing, screen-flickering or the like.
I tested that with LL 5.2 up to LL 6.0. Now I gave it up. I use the Intel integrated video chipset.

...On a second thought!
An idea came to my mind: I use for years video editing software and because of that, I'm used to install all kind of codecs.
Try this:
Open Lite Software, then check the "Restricted Extras" option. It will install some exotic media formats codecs.
Maybe this will work.

Best regards!

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

I appreciate it. I may try later.

Right now there's something not right with the Nouveau driver.
on a clean install I can go to system manager -> GPU and I get instant video corruption.
It also looks like the video acceleration may not be working - perhaps because it looks like it needs a firmware file from the proprietary driver. There is some comment somewhere saying it "Might" be able to Install it itself but looking at the performance I don't think so.

One of the goals is to run [older] games on this box with steam but unfortunately that's just not possible with 6.2.

[The Repairman]

What it boils down to is that the Linux developers have to reverse engineer the Nouveau driver from the git-go.

Nvidia has not shown any interest in helping Linux with development of the Nouveau driver and I doubt Nvidia ever will.

The other problem is us users feel our old outdated hardware should be supported forever and that would be nice if that could and would become a reality however it ain't gonna happen.

All good computers and computer hardware eventually loses out to old man time and becomes outdated and no longer supported I believe it's called progress.

Most if not all of my Linux computers are curb finds discarded by other users which I upgrade to the maximum using parts I have on hand from other curb finds and discarded computers.

Rule of thumb for me is to stick with a sure thing and what has always worked for me is ATI / AMD graphics and Intel graphics regardless of which type discrete / integrated / processor graphics.

[Şerban S.]

[...]Rule of thumb for me is to stick with a sure thing and what has always worked for me is ATI / AMD graphics and Intel graphics regardless of which type discrete / integrated / processor graphics.

I stick to the same rule. When I bought the desktop I'm on now (Dell, see the left panel data) I also bought a NVidia, just to grab an idea on what it might do on a Linux machine. I was disappointed, although I could use it without major problems. On the performance side though, the Intel GPU, is way better.
In early 2022, I bought a laptop for my wife, an ASUS M415U (6 cores, 12 threads). It works great. I had little time to test and tweak. However, in the few tests I could perform, I got some 75 - 85 FPS (topping at some 105 - 110 FPS) at rendering a video project I initially made on Dell. I just copied it on ASUS, for the exact purpose of testing the performance. While on the Intel GPU I usually get some 55 -65 FPS on a desktop, getting 75 -85 on a laptop, tells me something! The GPU is a Radeon. I forgot the details...
So, I subscribe to this philosophy: Better avoid NVidia, when possible.
On a recycled machine though, if it's a laptop, it's far more difficult, unless you work in a computer service.

Best regards!

[Mike Iwantprivacy]

Ok I'm posting this in case it helps someone in the future.
Pokeing around a bit more with the Nouveau driver.
Here is what I suspect the problem with the [semi] open source.
One some [but not all] cards the Nouveau driver needs a firmware blob from the proprietary driver to work properly.
- from the Nouveau page :

Firmware
VPE1/2 do not require any firmware to run. However, VP1/2/3/4/5 all require firmware to operate that is presently extracted from the NVIDIA binary driver. We cannot redistribute the firmware directly in linux-firmware because NVIDIA's license forbids redistribution of parts of their driver.

An effort is underway to fully reverse the underlying engines and create open-source firmware to provide out-of-the-box video decoding, please join us in #nouveau on www.oftc.net if you're interested in helping.

If you are lucky, your distribution may already have a package for installing the firmwares. Here is a list of the supported distribution:

Archlinux
Gentoo: sys-firmware/nvidia-firmware
More to come


Unfortunetly It looks like Ubuntu is not [yet] one of those disro's.
They have a method of downloading and extracting the blob, but I get some "magic" errors when I try using the extract_firmware.py application. Not sure whats up there.
I will reach out to them and see If I can clear that hurdle.

[LambD]

encountered this earlier lol, thread came in quite handy.