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Help with Mint Xfce black screen on boot (lemmy.ca)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I have an old Sony Vaio laptop that I'm trying to get Mint Xfce to work on. I needed to use compatibility mode when originally booting from the USB in case that's relevant.

The issue I have is that after the mint logo, it's just a black screen. A hard reset and starting in recovery mode will work, but I'd like to not have to go through recovery mode every time.

I'm assuming it's a driver issue with the Nvidia card (GeForce 310M), but the Driver Manager just shows a checkmark saying no drivers needed and nothing else (I'm guessing I should be able to see current drivers or something, anything?).

I've spent the last couple of hours searching in forums and have yet to figure out how to fix it.

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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Load in compatibility mode then

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelebek333/nvidia-legacy 
sudo apt update 
sudo apt install nvidia-340 xorg-modulepath

Reboot in normal mode

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    First two steps worked, but then I get errors and it says unable to locate those packages.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    stick with Linux Mint 21.3 . It's the last version where the xorg-modulepath-fix package is supported. On Mint 22 , this package is missing, and the legacy driver will likely fail due to the newer kernel changes

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago

    Alright, I created a new bootable USB with Xfce 21.3 and didn't have to use compatibility mode this time. Did a fresh install and all the updates and it looks to be working just fine now! It even seems to run a bit faster which is also nice. Thanks for the help, this did the trick!

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    • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (4 children)

    Hit ALT+F2 or F3 to see if you get a console. Make sure your GPU drivers are installed and loading with nvidia-smi. Blacklist the Nouveau driver if necessary.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Command not found and then it lists a bunch of options nvidia-utils-### (there's a bunch of different ones with different numbers, some ending in -server).

    How would I blacklist the nouveau driver? The driver manager doesn't seem to have any functionality beyond a big checkmark that says says (lies) that everything is good.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    How would I blacklist the nouveau driver?

    Create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ containing the text blacklist nouveau (worked for me on Gentoo and for a friend on Ubuntu) or add a kernel parameter module_blacklist=nouveau to your bootloader. However, if you don't have the correct proprietary driver, that won't help.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    I ended up installing an older version of mint as suggested by another comment and it seems to be working just fine now. Guess there's a limit to how backwards-compatible the newest version is.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    It's really more nvidia's fault than Mint's—the nvidia proprietary drivers periodically drop support for a generation or three of cards, and nouveau doesn't work properly with some cards because nvidia has a history of not giving out needed information.

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