Please allow me to put on my tin foil hat and play philosopher for a moment. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” (Charles Dickens - A tale of two cities) That kind of sounds like Linux to me. To paraphrase. The best thing about Linux is you can make it anything you want, the possibilities are endless. The worst thing about Linux is you can make it anything you want, the possibilities are endless. Yeah…that’s what sucked me into the Linux vortex.
“Beware the Ides of March”. (Shakespeare - Julius Caesar) The Linux version, “Beware the 90 second delay at boot up.” (Pudge - this post) Yeah…I actually went down that rabbit hole. Upon entering, I realized that the tunnel quickly turned into “the land of confusion”. (Phil Collins - The land of confusion) Before me lay a vast maze of duckduckgo searches. I kept meeting strange characters along the way. A Cheshire Cat told me “check /etc/fstab it’s confusing the computer into thinking a drive exists that isn’t there”. A hookah smoking caterpillar told me “A start job is running for /sys/subsystem/net/devices/enp0s20f0u3 (1 / 1min 30s) Check you WiFi settings.” The White Knight was talking backwards, so I don’t know what the hell he was telling me. All I got was something about “Wiki”? The dormouse simply said “Feed your head”. Gee…I wonder what that means, RTFM perhaps? Finally, I reached the end of the maze, only to find the Unholy Trinity. Gnome, Wayland, and Nvidia. The perfect storm of software combinations. Talk about “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (Winston Churchill - BBC radio address)
But seriously folks, enough satire, parody, or whatever. Be aware that the above satire does not apply to the EndeavourOS forum. In fact, the EndeavourOS forum is the exact opposite from above.
If you have the combination of Gnome (and maybe KDE) Wayland and Nvidia graphics and have a 90 second delay at boot up this is likely the solution to your problem. At least it’s worth a try.
Test hardware: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 cpu, 450 chipset, and Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. Software: EndeavourOS, Gnome DE, and nouveau or Nvidia drivers.
For nouveau
First, not many realize (including me until a couple of days ago) that nouveau has two components. The nouveau kernel module, and the xorg-video-nouveau xorg driver.
1 Remove any Nvidia drivers that may be installed.
2 Install nouveau drivers. pacman -S xorg-video-nouveau
3 edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf
find the line #WaylandEnable=false it should be commented out (prefaced by #) if not add the leading # to comment it out
4 edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
find the line MODULES=’" " edit it to MODULES=“nouveau”
5 mkintcpio -p linux
6 reboot
At the GDM login password entry screen, click on the options gear. You should see
GNOME
GNOME Classic
GNOME on Xorg
choose you poison, GNOME and GNOME Classic with be on Wayland, it’s obvious what GNOME on Xorg is.
After log-in, in a terminal window enter
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
You will get either wayland or x11 depending on your choice.
For Nvidia drivers
1 install drivers with nvidia-installer-dkms
2 edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf
find the line #WaylandEnable=false it may or may not be commented out (prefaced by #) if it is commented out, remove the leading # to uncomment it
3 edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
find the line MODULES=’" " edit it to MODULES=“nvidia”
4 mkinitcpio -p linux
5 reboot
At the GDM login password entry screen, click on the options gear. You should see
GNOME
GNOME Classic
Both of these choices will be on Xorg. I have not yet been able to use Nvidia drivers on Wayland.
After log-in, in a terminal window enter
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
You will get x11. At this point I haven’t gotten the Wayland option to work.
The Nvidia article in the EndeavourOS Wiki tells how to make Nvidia work with Wayland. Bear in mind that the wiki article was written before the recent changes in pacman. Either I missed something in the Wiki article, or it isn’t working now. It could also just be my particular combination of hardware. If someone knows how to make Wayland and Nvidia play nice together, please report here.
NOTE:
When you edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
Depending on your hardware, and software choices, the MODULES=" " line may look something like this MODULES=“ModuleA ModuleB” If so, for nouveau, just leave it as is. For Nvidia, leave a space after ModuleB and enter nvidia to get MODULES=“ModuleA ModuleB nvidia”
Now for the fly in the ointment. If you installed the Nvidia drivers with nvidia-installer-dkms then as per the comments listed as part if the install, the script edits /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and changes the MODULES= line to MODULES=" ". Maybe @manuel could check on whether this could be a problem if some modules were already specified the the MODULES= line. Could the nvidia-installer-dkms script wipe out any pre-specified modules? It just occurred to me, does nvidia-installer-dkms -n (removes nvidia and installs xorg-video-nouveau) also edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf?
As a side note, you may want to check out white rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
Pudge
“Call me Ishmael.”
