[HowTo] Compile old/legacy NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers [2020-12-30 Update Issue]

Contributions Tutorials
41

I have a 12 year old Macbook Pro! Graphics are noticeably slow on photo/video editing etc, but it show’s no sign of dying soon.
I upgraded this weekend after no update for about 14 months, and expectedly the next boot was to a black screen. The free drivers are unusable, but 340xx works. From the black screen after boot I was able to get into tty and then follow the instructions above (followed by # mhwd -r pci video-linux).
I still envision the possibility of going back to 419, but so far, no critical problems have cropped up.
Screen/keyboard brightness keys work, suspend/resume works, external monitor switching works, webcam works, no major graphics problems.
I used to have lots of problems with suspend/resume when various peripherals were connected, so we will see if that continues or is fixed.
Not happy about the future outlook. It’s going to become too much hassle to continue to update eventually, so I will either need to switch distros or just never update ever.

1 Like
42

It hasn’t helped, I removed all nvidia packages which were installed with 435 driver but my driver still works and I can’t install another one

43

How did you switch to nouveau?
I auto-installed free but Manjaro still boots using nvidia and I’m not sure how to actually switch.
Thread here: How to change from dropped legacy nvidia to nouveau?

44

From a terminal type modprobe nouveau to see if you get the nouveau gui. That will tell if the nouveau is working. If you are getting a black screen at boot you may need to press ctl alt F2 to get to a tty.

45

Hi! At the end, I decided to use nvidia-all installer (GitHub - Frogging-Family/nvidia-all: Nvidia driver 460 to 396 series AIO installer). Works very well.

2 Likes
47

Hi,

I am having a GT 740M card. I want to use nvidia-418 with linux54.
I was able to successfully complete the installation, but neither nvidia-smi nor optirun is working for me.

$ nvidia-smi 
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

$ optirun glxinfo
[  122.818794] [ERROR]The Bumblebee daemon has not been started yet or the socket path /var/run/bumblebee.socket was incorrect.
[  122.818867] [ERROR]Could not connect to bumblebee daemon - is it running?

$ bumblebeed 
[  694.737342] [ERROR]Module 'nvidia' is not found.

How to fix this?

48

It does not seem so. What steps did you take exactly?

49

Hi @pobrn ,

I did,

$  git clone https://gitlab.manjaro.org/packages/extra/linux54-extramodules/nvidia-418xx.git
$  git clone https://gitlab.manjaro.org/packages/multilib/lib32-nvidia-418xx-utils.git
$  git clone https://gitlab.manjaro.org/packages/extra/nvidia-418xx-utils.git

$ cd nvidia-418xx-utils
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ./../lib32-nvidia-418xx-utils
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ./../nvidia-418xx
$ makepkg -sif

in between, en error related to nvidia-390 dependency poped up which is fixed by removing those packages.

50

What’s the output of pacman -Qil linux54-nvidia-418xx?

51 
$ pacman -Qil nvidia-418
error: package 'nvidia-418' was not found

Oops. Something is wrong. Seems like it did not get installed!

52

I wrote the package name incorrectly, please check again.

53 
Name            : linux54-nvidia-418xx
Version         : 418.113-88
Description     : NVIDIA drivers for linux.
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://www.nvidia.com/
Licenses        : custom
Groups          : linux54-extramodules
Provides        : nvidia=418.113
Depends On      : linux54  nvidia-418xx-utils=418.113
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : None
Optional For    : bumblebee
Conflicts With  : linux54-nvidia-340xx  linux54-nvidia-390xx  linux54-nvidia-430xx  linux54-nvidia-435xx  linux54-nvidia-440xx  linux54-nvidia-450xx
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 12.32 MiB
Packager        : Unknown Packager
Build Date      : Saturday 03 April 2021 11:15:25 PM
Install Date    : Saturday 03 April 2021 11:16:58 PM
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : Yes
Validated By    : None

linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/nvidia-drm.ko.gz
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/nvidia-modeset.ko.gz
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/nvidia-uvm.ko.gz
linux54-nvidia-418xx /usr/lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/nvidia.ko.gz
54

That looks OK. What’s the output of sudo modprobe nvidia?

55 
$ sudo modprobe nvidia
modprobe: FATAL: Module nvidia not found in directory /lib/modules/5.4.101-1-MANJARO
56

During the build process, I also got an error regarding modules not found. I solved it by using version 5.4.105-1-MANJARO for extramodules.

Is it that creating the problem?

57

That might be it. What did you do exactly? And what’s the output of uname -r?

58 
$ uname -r
5.4.101-1-MANJARO

My original version file contained 101 as version

$ cat /lib/modules/extramodules-5.4-MANJARO/version
5.4.101-1-MANJARO

I edited it to 105 because that is the version I had for my extramodules installation.

With 101 as version, I was getting an error Cannot build target 'modules' when I run makepkg -sif inside nvidia-418.

59

That probably didn’t help. What’s the output of pacman -Q linux54 linux54-headers?

60 
$ pacman -Q linux54 linux54-headers
linux54 5.4.101-1
linux54-headers 5.4.105-1