Hi everyone,
I need your help with installing nvidia-340xx drivers on my late 2008 aluminum Macbook which has Nvidia 9400M inside.
I have two kernels installed: the mainline one and the 5.15 LTS one. I want to install the nvidia drivers on the 5.15 kernel.
What I’ve done so far:
successfully blacklisted the nouveau driver on the 5.15 kernel, so when I boot it up I’m stuck in the TTY (expected).
tried installing the nvidia-340xx package via pacman with the help of chaotic (tried building it first from yay but it would take days probably for the build to finish). The installation process was successful, at least no verbose error messages. I ran pacman -Q to check whether the package was indeed installed and it was there.
rebuilt initramfs with the dracut --force command - also successful
However, when I boot up, I’m still stuck in the TTY with no indication of nvidia drivers being loaded up at all. I ran lsmod | grep nvidia - no results, modinfo nvidia - error: nvidia module not found, modprobe nvidia - error: nvidia module not found. All of these commands indicate that the nvidia drivers aren’t loaded at all, it’s not like there’s some error preventing them from running, they aren’t just booted to begin with.
I don’t know what is wrong and how to fix this, as I seem to be following the general instructions on the installation of these drivers, and it should work?
Please don’t send me your links to general arch wiki pages, I’m interested in human help, I’ve browsed the web already enough and haven’t found anything that I could use to amend the issue.
Thanks everyone in advance.
see this it will help you
Are you installing the nvidia-340xx-dkms package (seeing as you have standard and LTS kernels installed)?
yay -S nvidia-340xx-dkms
Hi,
No, I don’t want to use the dkms package, as it tries to install the nvidia drivers for both kernels, but I just want them for the lts kernel. But I did try this package too and the result was the same.
Have you tried installing it from the aur without using chaotic?
Hey,
I have actually made it work, after having spent hours of trying to make these drivers work with all sorts of configurations and setups.
First of all, I decided to roll back to the arch-supported lts kernel 6.12. Then I installed the nvidia-340xx-lts package from yay. After that I installed the nvidia-340xx-lts-dkms package from yay - the latter downloaded the dkms module that was apparently missing from the 1st package, and after the initramfs had been rebuilt via dracut, the drivers finally worked!! I saw the NVIDIA logo and everything worked like a charm.
I’m not sure why I had to install 1st the regular lts package and then the dkms package to make it work, as I did try installing both the lts and the dkms packages separately in the past and none of them worked on its own, but apparently I had to combine them to achieve the result..? Anyways, it works and I’m happy.
Also, the screen shredding described in one of my previous thread upon boot is gone as well with the Nvidia drivers. In addition, now my mini DP connection is detected too and I can use my external monitor! which was impossible to achieve with the nouveau drivers.
Yeah, so nvidia drivers are definitely 100% better than the nouveau ones, at least on the old rigs.
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