Video Driver Failure?

I have an Alienware m18x R2 laptop. It has dual nVidia 675M GPUs (SLI)
It was fine on initial install, but now (probably after installing Steam) I’m stuck in 1024x768 on “Unknown-1-unknown”

I’ve tried (re)installing nouveau drivers and running nvidia-inst
Nothing is fixing the issue.
Attaching screenies.


Any suggestions?

Some things you can try:

  • Assuming you are using the nouveau driver, you can try installing package vulkan-nouveau too.
  • The GPU would need Nvidia series 390 driver, but not sure if that works anymore.
  • If you uninstall all steam related packages, does it work any better?

For the record, what’s the output of command

pacman -Q | grep -P 'nvidia|nouveau'

Your graphics card drivers are showing as “N/A” so they got messed up somehow.
Follow the command from @manuel above so we can see what nv packages are installed.
Though I also wonder about the “installing steam” transaction - this should not break your drivers. How was steam installed? Was it a a partial upgrade somehow?

Just an update. I fixed it by uninstalling Steam, reinstalling video drivers (Nouveau), then re-installing Steam.

However, the root of the problem (I think) could use some feedback for future reference: When installing Steam (in konsole) it prompts me a couple times having identified multiple repositories to download packages from. In both prompts these are specifically for Steam video packages (Vulcan/Nvidia/etc.)
I guess I picked the wrong thing; there was a Steam video dependency blocking me from reinstalling the proper video drivers.

To provide useful pointers we need logs about how you installed the packages. Please copy the install command and the full output here.

Also post the contents of file /etc/pacman.conf.

Tip: to make the output more readable, embed all text between two lines of three backtics (i.e. ```) like this:

```
Add the command and the output here.
```

How can I retrieve the logs of the installs? (Konsole)?

Its in /var/log/pacman.log … open/inspect/sort as desired.

cat /var/log/pacman.log
sed -E '/2025-01-06/!d' /var/log/pacman.log

For example:

sudo pacman -Syu |& tee /tmp/foo.log
cat /tmp/foo.log | eos-sendlog

and show the returned address here.