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.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • usualsuspect191@lemmy.caOP
      11·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • nyan@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • usualsuspect191@lemmy.caOP
          1·
          1 day ago

          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.

          • nyan@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            7 hours 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.