New To Bodhi, Question About Nvidia Drivers
 

I have an old Gateway desktop with the 6150se chipset. I had a video card but it died, as did my upgraded power supply unit. So I'm currently back to on-board graphics and a 300W psu. This requires the Nvidia 304 driver or it will crash constantly. So, I'm using Ubuntu 16, Linux Lite 3.8 and now Bodhi 4.5. All are Ubuntu 16-based, as Nvidia stopped supporting this driver later than kernel 4.4. You can't install the 304 driver on systems beyond Ubuntu 16.They just won't install.

So, I'm good with Lite and Bodhi until April, when they won't be supported any longer. Canonical offers support on Ubuntu 16 beyond that, all the way to 2024, and the 4.4 kernel is supported that long also. I'm reluctant to get a new video card as it will probably also mean a new psu, and the computer is 12 years old. Besides, with the Nvidia driver it works great.

Edit: I also need to avoid kernel updates that won't allow installation of the 304 driver. With this in mind, I'm holding off on updating Bodhi. So any info re: how to do that would be appreciated also.

So, I'm planning to install the 4.4 kernel on Bodhi 5 and Linux Lite 4 when April rolls around. I can't think of another way to use this computer with these systems. The open source drivers just won't work on it. Does this make sense? Is there another way?

By the way, Bodhi is awesome, I'm very impressed. It is extremely fast even on an old hard drive. It's also nice looking and very well organized. Great operating system.

6150SE is NVIDIA, I used to have a similar mobo.
I can confirm this; the nouveau driver does not play well with this old GPU, at least not ootb.

IMO, your best bet is to

• buy a graphics card & calculate how much power you will need (online PSU calculators exist) - maybe you can buy one that does NOT require a stronger PSU
• bite the bullet and finally replace this old mobo (maybe get a used one cheaply that allows you to continue using its components)

BTW, almost any onboard GPU in the last decade or so has way more oomph than your Nvidia 6150SE.

that's an interesting idea. I have thought about doing a rebuild at some point with this system. It makes more sense than just upgrading the video, which might also require a psu upgrade. Sooner or later something else major will go, like the CPU. Maybe something I will think about over the long Maine winter...

Update on this: Bodhi 4.5 stopped booting. I tried some boot repairs but to no avail. I just installed bodhi 5. So far it's working well, no crashes, and it's using open source drivers. I had Bodhi 5 installed awhile back, but I can't remember why I gave up on it. Hopefully it will continue working.

if you have some extra disk space, i find timeshift snapshots easy to use in case an update breaks something and i need to roll back to a previous system configuration.

Great idea, i will do that!

I got timeshift installed, but I'm not sure which option to choose in the setup wizard. The two choices are Rsync and BTRFS.

Edit: Just did some research, it looks like I can use Rsync. I have bodhi all alone on a 500 GB HDD, so I don't need to worry about space. It looks like you might need to create a partition if you weant to use it in BTRFS mode.

my understanding from here is that you would only use btrfs if you had installed bodhi using btrfs instead of ext4 which is the default:

I have an old system that also only takes nvidia-304 or open source, and neither one is ideal.

But I did manage to get nvidia-304 installed on bodhi 5... I believe I even posted it here....https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...6/#post5880074
but i followed this advice https://adufray.com/blog/2018/06/02/...-127-on-bionic

Interesting. I saved the "patch" tutorial in case I want to try it with another 18-based distro. But for now, Bodhi 5 continues to work flawlessly with noveau drivers, and I'm even able to use Vivaldi browser, after disabling acceleration. Thanks for sharing this info.

I have a fairly old HP Z400 with an Nvidia Quadro FX1800 card on it. Bodhi 5.1 recognized it and installed the correct driver during installation, the only distro I use (of several) which did that. Mint and Ubuntu Unity found the driver AFTER installation and applied it easily. OpenSUSE refuses to install it, although it identifies the correct driver and I've even downloaded the correct driver from Nvidia.

Was it the 304 driver? I'd be surprised if it installed that driver without some serious tinkering.

Bodhi continues to impress me. Definitely one of the top 2 or 3 light distros. Light enough for really old graphics, yet still very powerful AND beautiful.

I just ran sudo lshw -c video

It did not show the driver number, but it did correctly identify my card as a Quadro FX 1800. How do I find the driver number?

Try this command: nvidia-smi

zaivala@zaivala-Kudu:~$ nvidia-smi

Command 'nvidia-smi' not found, but can be installed with:

sudo apt install nvidia-340
sudo apt install nvidia-utils-390

zaivala@zaivala-Kudu:~$