Fedora 16 - Uninstall proprietary Nvidia driver and switch back to Nouveau

-
If you have an Nvidia graphics card, then one of the first things you'd probably do after installing Fedora is to disable nouveau driver and install the Nvidia proprietary driver. The easiest way to do this is using the packages from RPMFusion.

But if you happen to be unlucky like me, you'd have KDE apps (and some others too) crashing all around the place with this proprietary Nvidia driver. Apparently, there's some compatibility problem between glibc and the Nvidia driver. Switching back to nouveau is the best way out.

Here's how to uninstall the proprietary Nvidia driver from RPMFusion and get back to nouveau driver.

  1. Switch to a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3 and login as 'root'
  2. Switch to runlevel 3 (terminate X):
    init 3
  3. Get a list of all nvidia packages installed:
    yum list installed "*nvidia*"
  4. Remove these packages. Use the following sample command:
    yum remove kmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia-PAE nvidia-settings nvidia-xconfig xorg-x11-drv-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs
  5. Confirm that none of the following files exists. If they do, delete them or move them to some backup location.
    /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-nvidia.conf
    /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
  6. Re-create initramfs to remove the blacklisting of nouveau
    dracut --force
  7. Reboot the computer
    reboot

The above steps worked for me and brought back nouveau. All these days, I was waiting for the proprietary driver to be fixed. In the mean time, I was using LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1 in my profile file to avoid the crashes. But so many days have passed without any improvement. With nouveau, I get reasonable 3D performance and desktop effects. Best of all, no crashes :-)




Comments

  1. davidTuesday, January 3, 2012 at 2:00:00 AM GMT+5:30

    It's nice to see that nouveau is making progress. Yet, I didn't get reasonable performance on a older Nvidia card (7200 GT). The problems with the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Fedora 16 are still unresolved as of now (Janurary 2012):
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753279
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=751891

    For me it made more sense to roll back the machine with the Nvidia card to Fedora 15.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Solid SmokeTuesday, January 3, 2012 at 6:57:00 AM GMT+5:30

    Indeed.. At one point, rolling back to F15 seemed like the best idea. My Samsung SCX-3201G MFP still doesn't work with F16 (Samsung's fault, entirely).

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousTuesday, March 13, 2012 at 4:52:00 AM GMT+5:30

    awesome! thanks! Saved a lot of problem for me - had installed the nvidia drivers, but some upgrades to the kernel had preventing booting into any of the kernels. Then discovered I couldn't back up from a live cd due to the new non-physical partitions default. Lucky I found this...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Solid SmokeTuesday, March 13, 2012 at 6:48:00 AM GMT+5:30

    @Anonymous
    Thanks.. Glad that I could be of some help. There has been an updated nvidia driver. But I haven't tested it out yet.

    ReplyDelete
  5. houdaoMonday, March 19, 2012 at 9:15:00 AM GMT+5:30

    Great Thanks! Failed after install nvidia drivers. Now my desktop seems normal~~~

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousFriday, March 30, 2012 at 8:31:00 PM GMT+5:30

    thanls saved my laptop, think i will give the nvidia drivers a miss from now on

    ReplyDelete
  7. BreakpointTuesday, April 10, 2012 at 11:54:00 AM GMT+5:30

    It's really hit or miss. Your best bet is to try both for a week or so each and see what's best for you. I use the nVidia drivers because Nouveau doesn't seem to work with Gnome Shell properly on this card (or, indeed, any of my other hardware), but the nVidia drivers seem to. On the other hand, once in a great while the screen will blank out for a few seconds as the drivers crash and restart-- but they seem to recover okay.

    I'd really rather use Nouveau, so that I can maintain my whole system the same way, but it just doesn't seem to be an option yet.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousTuesday, April 17, 2012 at 4:45:00 PM GMT+5:30

    it perfectly worked for me, thanks leo

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownTuesday, June 19, 2012 at 3:55:00 AM GMT+5:30

    Thankyou. This worked for me. I used this guide on Fedora 17/64 to fix a borked nvidia driver install.

    I now have correct screen resolution and everything booted correctly.

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousFriday, April 19, 2013 at 2:02:00 PM GMT+5:30

    Thanks mate, it did actually saved a lot of time for me. keep up your good work.
    cheers!!

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousFriday, June 14, 2013 at 5:14:00 AM GMT+5:30

    Woot, thanks man! I'm using Fedora 18 and it still really helped! Despite that the remove commands didn't work (because I installed NVidia drivers through another way) you really helped me out a lot!

    ReplyDelete
  12. EliasvanWednesday, August 28, 2013 at 9:14:00 PM GMT+5:30

    Thanks for the info!
    Is there a way to make a dual boot between
    - a kernel with nvidia and
    - a kernel with nouveau
    ?

    So without uninstalling the nvidia driver (step 4. in your post).
    Because I'm planning to do some experiments comparing both drivers.
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SyamWednesday, August 28, 2013 at 10:04:00 PM GMT+5:30

      I think it might be possible. Some things that come to mind:
      1. You'll have to create two initramfs (using dracut)
      2. Add a custom grub2 entry by editing /etc/grub2/40_custom

      Delete
    2. EliasvanThursday, August 29, 2013 at 1:41:00 AM GMT+5:30

      Thanks for the quick reply!
      Those steps are really helpful, but I wonder what to do with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-nvidia.conf, /usr/lib/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf files:
      I thought executing a bash script (that moves these files to their places) at grub startup is not possible, or should I also create a custom systemd service?

      P.S.: I'm on Fedora 19.

      Delete
    3. EliasvanThursday, August 29, 2013 at 2:22:00 AM GMT+5:30

      This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    4. EliasvanThursday, August 29, 2013 at 2:24:00 AM GMT+5:30

      Ok, this is weird:
      So I performed the following steps to revert to nouveau without uninstalling the nvidia rpms:
      1. I removed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-nvidia.conf, /usr/lib/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf files (but I also made a backup ;) )
      2. In /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, I removed the following text: 'nouveau.modeset=0 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau video=vesa:off' since it was added by the nvidia installation.
      3. Ran 'dracut --force'.
      4. Finally did a 'reboot'.

      The results were preposterous: as soon as Kwin started up with desktop effects enabled, everything seemed like it was upside-down, but not entirely: all text-labels were reversed and upside-down, as well as all icons...
      The desktop effects were clearly hardware accelerated, but 'glxinfo' said direct rendering: 'No'.
      Games did not start up properly.

      I don't understand why nouveau doesn't work anymore (it did before the installation of binary nvidia)?
      Have I missed something?

      Delete
    5. ifoolbSaturday, October 11, 2014 at 5:48:00 PM GMT+5:30

      nouveau needs KMS enabled, so you may need to add 'nouveau.modeset=1' in kernel boot parameters. And also make sure nouveau is not in module load blacklist.

      Delete
  13. Benson BearThursday, March 20, 2014 at 9:07:00 AM GMT+5:30

    Yes, you are still using the nvidia libraries from xorg. There should be a file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d that is including a path where these libraries are found. You have to remove that as well, and run ldconfig. That should be enough

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

പേര്

-
Image
ഒരു പേരിലെന്തിരിക്കുന്നു എന്ന് പലരും ചോദിക്കറുണ്ടല്ലോ.. പക്ഷേ ചില കുട്ടികളുടെ പേരുകള്‍ കേട്ടാല്‍ ഇത്രയും വേണമായിരുന്നോ എന്ന് തോന്നിപ്പോകും. ഈയടുത്ത് ഒരാള്‍ 'മൃത്യു' എന്ന് പേരുള്ള ഒരു കുട്ടിയെ പരിചയപ്പെട്ടു എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞുകേട്ടു. ഏതാണ്ട് ഒരു കൊല്ലം മുമ്പ് ഞാനും ഭാര്യയും ഞങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് ജനിക്കാനിരിക്കുന്ന കുഞ്ഞിന്റെ പേര് തപ്പിനടക്കുകയായിരുന്നു. സ്കാനിങ്ങ് ചെയ്തപ്പോഴൊന്നും കുട്ടി ആണാണോ പെണ്ണാണോ എന്നൊന്നും ഞങ്ങള്‍ അന്വേഷിച്ചില്ല. പക്ഷേ യാതൊരു അടിസ്ഥാനവുമില്ലാത്ത ഏതോ തോന്നല്‍ കാരണം കുട്ടി പെണ്ണ് തന്നെ എന്ന് ഞങ്ങള്‍ ഉറപ്പിച്ചു. എന്റെ പേരന്വേഷണത്തിലുള്ള ചൂടില്ലായ്മയെ പഴിച്ച് പ്രിയതമ കൊണ്ടുപിടിച്ച അന്വേഷണം തുടങ്ങി. അദ്ദേഹത്തിന് ഒരുപാട് നിബന്ധനകള്‍ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. ആരും കേട്ടിട്ടുള്ള പേരായിരിക്കരുത്, S, U, Vമുതലായ അക്ഷരമാലയില്‍ അവസാനത്തില്‍ വരുന്ന അക്ഷരങ്ങളില്‍ തുടങ്ങരുത് മുതലായ കഠിനമായ നിബന്ധനകള്‍. അങ്ങനെ ഇടയ്ക്കിടയ്ക്ക് ഇദ്ദേഹം ഓരോ പേരുകള്‍ കണ്ടുപിടിച്ച് കൊണ്ടുവരും. ഒട്ടുമിക്ക പേരുകളും ഞാന്‍ വീറ്റോ ചെയ്തുകളയും. ഇത് വായിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് ഒരു പക്ഷേ ഞാന്‍ ചെയ്തത് ശരിയായില്ല എന്ന്
Read more

Qt - Enabling qDebug messages and Qt Creator

-
I have been struggling for the past two hours to get qDebug() messages from my Qt 5 application to show up on the 'Application output' pane in Qt Creator IDE on Linux. Finally I found a solution, thanks to a user on Qt IRC channel. To enable log messages in Qt, do the following: Edit ~/.config/QtProject/qtlogging.ini and make sure it has: [Rules] *.debug=true qt.*.debug=false With this, I was getting the messages when I run the application from a terminal. But Qt Creator was not showing the qDebug() messages. To have the messages displayed in Qt Creator, do the following: Qt creator > Tools > Options > Kits, select your kit, find Environment, click change and add: QT_ASSUME_STDERR_HAS_CONSOLE=1 This fixed the problem for me. I thought I should document the full process here as Google wasn't getting me good leads. My environment: Fedora 29 Linux x86-64 Qt 5.11.3 Qt Creator v4.7.2 References: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12272
Read more

ബിഗ് റേഡിയോ ഇതിഹാസം

-
ഇന്ന് തിരുവനന്തപുരത്ത് 92.7 ബിഗ് എഫ്എം റേഡിയോ പരിപാടിയില്‍ കേട്ടത്..  പരിപാടി: " സ്വീറ്റ് ആന്‍സി " അവതരിപ്പിക്കുന്ന റിക്വസ്റ്റ് രാഗ, യെസ് ഓര്‍ നോ ഗെയിം ... സ്വീആ: ഹലോ, ആരാ വിളിക്കുന്നത്?  റസാക്ക് സ്വീആ: റസാക്ക് അല്ലേ.. "റസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം" വായിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ടോ? റസാക്ക്: ഇല്ല സ്വീആ: എന്താ റസാക്കേ, സ്വന്തം പേരില്‍ ഒരു പുസ്തകമൊക്കെ ഉള്ളപ്പോള്‍ അത് വായിക്കണ്ടേ? റസാക്ക്: ങേ? ... സ്വീആ: അപ്പോള്‍ റസാക്കിനും റസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം ഇഷ്ടപ്പെടുന്ന വായനക്കാര്‍ക്കും വേണ്ടി ഈ പാട്ട് ഡെഡിക്കേറ്റ് ചെയ്യുന്നു... ...  വാല്‍:  മഹാനായ എഴുത്തുകാരന്‍ പിണറായി വിജയന്‍ എഴുതിയ "റസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം" എന്നോ മറ്റോ പറയാതിരുന്നത് തന്നെ ഭാഗ്യം ...  ചോദ്യം: 'ചങ്ങമ്പുഴ' എന്ന കവിത എഴുതിയത് ആരാണ്? ഉത്തരം: അങ്ങനെയൊരു കവിതയുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ അതെഴുതിയത് രമണനായിരിക്കും! (കടപ്പാട്: കണ്ട് മറന്ന ഒരു പഴയ മലയാളം സിനിമ)
Read more