Help me on elementary OS about nvidia driver

Question

Excuse me. I am a newer on linux. Because my Mac air is older. And i found elementary OS is a good solution on old mac air. So i installed it. It’s beautiful. But I have a problem to use it. It has something problem on my screen. Please see the picture under it.i just installed the elementary OS directly, did not install anything,it has the screen problem.

My Mac air is

But when i opened the AppCenter. It appeared has two apps to install as free. Then I installed the Nvidia 340.107 .

It’s bad. I can’t open my Mac again. When open my mac. The screen is black. and stop, can not enter it, Maybe the nivida driver 304 is not support to my Mac. Then i searched it on nvidia website. I found nvidia 340.1010 to support GEFORCE 320M.

But how can I use it and run it on my Mac. Please help me. I have restored my computer for 3 times. So amazing. Because I like elementary OS. So i didn’t give up.

At this time. I installed pop_s! It has nvidia OS,it is ok, screen does not has any problem. But the system made my mac so slow. At last I back to elementary OS. Please help me to solve the screen problem. Thanks!

Your truly!

Answer 1

You better not install the driver from the Nvidia website, most of the people who do this complain for problems later. Instead you can try the appCenter first, use the "Installed" tab on top and wait for a while. A list of Nvidia drivers should appear there. I do not know about the macs, but my laptop works well with the latest version of the driver, you can start with it. But it is important to wait until the information is fetched. If this do not work, you can try using terminal, type there sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinsall the system will ask for your admin password - you have to enter it.

Answer 2

To me this looks like a physical defect on the screen panel, not software related, but I could be wrong.

Try to choose an all black wallpaper color, not an image but the plain color option, see if the spots are showing up or just stays half-lit grey. Then do the same with a all-white color background as wallpaper.

As for the driver... Indeed it should have been possible to expect that Nvidia 320M IS Nvidia 320M on both a PC and a Mac. Sadly this is not always the case. Just try to search for "Nvidia drivers for Apple MacBook" or similar and you'll get the full story.

I've used Linux and Nvidia cards on Apple hardware many times, and if you don't need all the juice from the chip, try installing the latest supported Nouveau driver.

Check out this link from Debian (of which elementary OS is a descendant).

If this gets TLDR; it basically it says that Mesa's nouveau_dri driver module is your best bet.

Answer 3

As of elementary OS 6, the Nvidia 340.108 driver is end of life and no longer available in the Linux kernel provided.

It is possible to use the Nvidia driver on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but because eOS 6 ships the Hardware Enablement (HWE) with a newer underlying kernel, this driver is not available on eOS 6.

Your best bet is to stick with the default nouveau divers. Aside from some performance issues, the main problem with the nouveau drivers and the GeForce 320M is that wake from suspend will not work. You can disable suspend in the settings to avoid this issue.

Sources

If you try to install Nvidia 340.108 from App Center on eOS 6, you will get the same error described in this Kubuntu forum post: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1284266/the-installation-of-the-nvidia-display-driver-340-fails-in-kubuntu-20-10

And here is Ubuntu Launchpad discussion that nvidia-340.108 has reached end of life from Nvidia and will no longer be included in Linux kernels past 5.10. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-340/+bug/1872950