On Thursday, 27 June 2024 23:52:25 BST Dale wrote:
It's your call which drivers you should try to get it to work with first. Slow GUI response with the nouveau driver would indicate the kernel configuration/firmware loading was not 100% when you trying initially, because it works fine when you tried it again with Kubuntu's kernel. People who use Nvidia prefer the nvidia driver in terms of performance, CUDA, etc. so you may want to stick with the nvidia driver initially. In this case, walk through this guide and cross-check you followed all suggestions in there to configure your kernel, including disabling the nouveau driver. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NVIDIA/nvidia-drivers
If you intend to have both nouveau and nvidia drivers and switch between them, then you can build nouveau as a module and implement the more convoluted switching methods suggested in the next guide, but I suggest you leave this for later and not confuse the two drivers: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Nouveau_%26_nvidia-drivers_switching
Having checked your kernel against the nvidia-driver guide, installed your updated kernel & initramfs images you should reboot. Use 'lspci -k' and scan dmesg to make sure nvidia is loaded and there were no hiccups. You've tried not having an xorg.conf and didn't work, or at least it did not work reliably. Mind you, you also tried with a xorg.conf and this didn't make things better. LOL! However, I think this was because the "Monitor" section was mostly empty: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" Option "DPMS" EndSection Restart, if you need to, the display-manager until you eventually arrive at a fully loaded and functioning desktop. nvidia-smi should reveal if the driver is loaded and working fully. You can run nvidia-settings, (emerge x11- drivers/nvidia-drivers with USE="tools") to tweak resolution and frequency for your monitor, which will then be stored in your config file: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/1.0-6106/nvidia-settings-user-guide.txt
O, while all is working as desired 'xrandr -q' will provide you with some useful information for your xorg.conf: Identifier - e.g. "DisplayPort-0", or "LG Electronics W2253" Modeline - e.g. Modeline 1920x1080_60.0 138.50 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1083 1088 1111 +hsync +vsync and you can set a preferred option in your xorg.conf; e.g. HorizSync 15.0 - 67.0 VertRefresh 59.0 - 60.0 Modeline "1920x1080_60.0 138.50 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1083 1088 1111 +hsync +vsync" Option "PreferredMode" "1920x1080"_60.0" or some such.
If the above won't do it, you can capture the monitor's EDID while it is working - you can use nvidia-settings again: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3571/~/managing-a-display-edid-on-linux There's a more manual way to do this too: find /sys |grep -i edid then copy the corresponding file to /lib/firmware/LG/W2253_edid.bin and add it to your kernel before you recompile it: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/edid.html# See if the above helps you to a stable monitor, or post back with xorg.0.log results.