On the plus side, I was learning a lot about Linux. I added things to blacklists, and removed things from blacklists, and installed different display managers, and regenerated initramfs, and banged on the desk while laughing hysterically, and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things but all to no avail. I added repositories and installed drivers. The laptop contains a NVIDIA graphics card, and apparently there are a whooooole load of issues with using Fedora and GNOME display manager (Fedora’s default graphical system) on NVIDIA hardware. Then I spent several days trying ALL SORTS of fixes and tweaks and changes that I found on the internet. I started by upgrading the OS with a sudo dnf update, which took a while, as expected. Once again I had to run the installer in “basic graphics” mode, and so I was faced with lower-than-ideal screen resolution. For good measure, I decided to start with a fresh installation of the latest version the OS, Fedora 30.
I rebooted the laptop: it froze immediately.īy this time I’d had enough for one day, so I shut the lid and forgot about it.įast-forward an ENTIRE YEAR and finally, I had the time and inclination to take another look at the problem. “Hah, problem solved!” I exclaimed, exterminating nomodeset from wherever it appeared. So after a LOT of searching and reading, I eventually discovered the /etc/default/grub file and the nomodeset boot parameter.
I knew how to do simple command line things, but I didn’t really know how Linux was set up, or how to change boot parameters, or what on earth a GRUB was, or any of those other fun low-level system things. Of course, I wanted to take advantage of all 1080 of my available p’s, so set about looking for the issue.īear in mind that this was more or less my first experience with a Linux OS. However, after rebooting, it became clear that this had come with a catch: my screen was now stuck at a low resolution. I was attempting to use Fedora Media Writer to install the OS onto the laptop but every time I successfully booted to the installation GUI, the laptop would freeze completely and I’d have to turn it off via the power button.Įventually I succeeded by means of the installer’s “basic graphics mode”.
I managed to nab myself a chunky old Dell Latitude and, much to the frustration of my friend in IT who had spent the afternoon setting up a fresh Windows installation for me, asked him to borrow a USB stick and then immediately wiped the hard drive so that I could install Fedora.
I had been toying with the idea of getting a spare laptop anyway in order to play around with a Linux-based operating system, so this was the perfect opportunity.
Sometime last year my company decided to upgrade its IT assets, and consequently sold off a bunch of old laptops to interested employees. This is a play-by-play of my debugging process, and ultimately the solution turned out to be rather simple. Here you can log in as your normal user, become root, and then perform any administrative tasks to finish installing the nVidia driver.TL DR: I had mega issues with getting NVIDIA graphics to work on Fedora. If your system has booted to a sufficiently advanced state and is not hung, you should then see a login prompt.
Boot your system as normal and wait for it to make it as far as it goes.
This includes uninstalling the nVidia driver or recreating the initramfs as per the tutorial.Īlternatively, depending on how far your system makes it in the boot process, you may be able to access a text-only console without changing any boot parameters. From here you can log in as your normal user, then become root and perform any administrative tasks that you need. At the end of the line, add a number corresponding to the mode you want to boot: 1 - Single User Modeĥ - Graphics Mode (Usually the default mode)įor problems with a graphics driver, it's usually sufficient to boot into text-only mode (i.e., 3). This will produce a GRUB menu editor containing the selected boot commands. When you boot your computer, press e at the GRUB screen (the screen where you select which kernel you want to boot). You can force booting into a specific mode when first turn on your computer by appending a number to the end of the linux line in GRUB2 (or the kernel line, in GRUB Legacy). You can boot into single user mode or text-only mode, make the necessary changes, and then boot back into graphical mode.