I saved it to a textfile called nvidia.txt, but I’m not sure how to transfer it to the computer I’m using right now. I’m trying to mount a USB stick right now to /mnt, but it is failing saying wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock, missing codepage or helper program, or something else)
I can tell some basic info about my computer: CPU: Intel Q8400 GPU: GTX 210 Kernel:5.4
I have tried to install the proprietary drivers again, but it fails.
I finally got the Nouveau drivers working and am happy with it. I can see this is a way forward for us who use old Nvidia cards on older hardware. To ditch the 340.xx driver was a pain, but hey, it was never going to be updated, just patched and repatched which is not a sustainable solution long term.
I forgot to add that you might need to install kernel headers and the base-devel group. If you get an error while building nvidia-340xx-dkms, install them. I edited my earlier comment.
Here you should press enter, and let it just install all.
Here I think you should also press enter, and let it install the 5.10 kernel. If you don’t have any reason to use 5.4, it’s probably worth the try. I just tested it and the NVIDIA driver should actually build for both 5.4 and 5.10 - if I haven’t missed anything -, but the PKGBUILD requires >=5.5.
Did it succeed? You should see nvidia-340xx-utils, lib32-nvidia-340xx-utils, and nvidia-340xx-dkms in the output of pacman -Q | grep nvidia. If you see all that, you should be good to do. And you can reboot.
It should be set and forget, but do not upgrade to Linux 5.11 or above for the time being. Another thing, I see that you have Linux 4.19 installed, if you don’t need it, I would recommend keeping only 5.4 and 5.10 to minimize the number of potential “failure points”.
Do not take my word for it. I noticed at the Debian website discussing Nouveau they described The 2D state of Nouveau as “quite useful.” The post was from three days ago. If you are not a gamer switching to the open source driver is an easy call.