Nvidia Optimus laptop won't boot

[gotmax]

Hi,

I have a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus graphics. I am currently running Solus as it has the best compatibility with my machine and I had trouble installing other distros as well. I would really like to use Debian with bumblebee and proprietary drivers.

I tried booting into the GNOME live enviornment and it got stuck booting. The regular debian installer booted, but the live interface wouldn't. I tried multiple times and couldn't get it to work. The error message said something about nouveau. I can try boot it again and respond with the exact error.
Here is is output of lspci:

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00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 630 (Mobile)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] (rev 10)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 10)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake Mobile PCH SATA AHCI Controller (rev 10)
00:1b.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #21 (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f0)
00:1d.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #14 (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device a328 (rev 10)
00:1e.3 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device a32b (rev 10)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device a30d (rev 10)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile] (rev a1)
03:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)

Is there a way that I can use the classic Debian installer to install and boot to the terminal to install the proprietary drivers? Or is there another way to do it?

Thanks for your help.

[stevepusser]

Some Optimus laptops require you to boot with the nouveau driver disabled until you install bumblebee-nvidia, which then blacklists nouveau.

"nouveau.modeset=0 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau"

[gotmax]

Some Optimus laptops require you to boot with the nouveau driver disabled until you install bumblebee-nvidia, which then blacklists nouveau.

"nouveau.modeset=0 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau"

Hi,
So I was able to install debian and boot to a live interface by blacklisting nouveau as you said. I actually just used the nouveau.modeset=0 and not the other line.

I also tried to install bumblebee by using

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 sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bumblebee-nvidia primus libgl1-nvidia-glx primus-libs:i386 libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386   

as shown on the wiki.
It just doesn't work correctly. I tried to get it to work and after it failed reinstalled the entire os about three times. I tried installing the packages using synaptic (synaptic had issues with conflicting packages and I had to unmark some conflicting packages. After doing installing the packages in synaptic and rebooting the booting got stuck at the Debian boot image) , aptitude instead of apt-get, and it just doesn't correctly). I also tried different config options like making sure Xorg!Bumblebee had the correct BusId for the Nvidia card and cresting symlinks to the Libgl library as explained at 10:00 in this video/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM_kp8mgpGw

I have a 1050TI in my machine which is apparently supported by the regular and legacy drivers and when pulling up the dependencies it seemed to try to install the legacy version of the drivers and librarys and the regular version. The furthest I got was being able to boot into Gnome Wayland (the xorg version would freeze whenever I tried to login. If I had booted the system logged into Gnome Wayland, logged out of Gnome Wayland AND THEN logged into Gnome Xorg it would work) and

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optirun glxgears

would work, but it would show an error and wouldn't show the FPS rate. Is this how it was supposed to work and should I have not wiped out the system when it was configured like this)?

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primusrun glxgears

would open and show the FPS rate. Also when ever I boot it shows some error message about ACPI. What's that about? Here is a picture of the error message on my Nextcloud : https://cloud.saltz.com/index.php/s/Q4NFYxyXo3iRCY3 I got a similar error message on PopOS.

The wiki is kind of unclear about all the Bumblebee stuff and I'd just like clear instructions on the best way to set it up. I'm not really a gamer (if possible I would like playing Steam games possible on my system) and I'd just like to be able to use my laptop for ocassional photo and video and photo editing. Additionally, I want good battery life and Bumblebee can turn off Nvidia GPU when not in use. If possible I'd like both Gnome and KDE to be installed and be configured properly with bumblebee.

Again, I really appreciate your help. Thanks.

[gotmax]

Hi,

I started from scratch again and tried installing bumblebee without the 32-bit libraries just to make sure that wasn't causing problems. Gnome XOrg still wouldn't work and Optirun and Primusrun wouldn't work either. I tried several troubleshooting steps, but I still couldn't get it to work. Here is a table of what I did: https://tinyurl.com/y6hjbv4d

I decided to stop here. Can anyone tell me what I should do after trying these steps?

Additionally,I get a Iwlwifi error after closing the lid and then trying to resume my session. I had a similar error on PopOS. https://tinyurl.com/yy3xwdpr
I did double-check that the iwlwifi firmware package is installed.

Lastly, it won't connect to my display that is hooked up via mini-displayport/thunderbolt. In the Gnome settings, under the thunderbult section, there is an error that says no thunderbolt support. Here is a screenshot: https://tinyurl.com/yyhhlops

I know those two errors aren't directly related to graphics, but I thought that I'd add them, anyways. I really appreciate it. Those links are to the images hosted on my Nextcloud server. Nothing malicious. I couldn't figure out how to add them directly in the forum.

[stevepusser]

You need to also install compilers and your kernel's headers package to build the driver. The quick way to do this is to install module-assistant and run as root or with sudo:

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m-a prepare

If your driver builds had actually succeeded, you would have seen a message about the nouveau driver being blacklisted, and advising a reboot as the easiest way to proceed. Since you didn't mention that, I assume the builds failed. The missing headers/compilers are the most common reason for that.

[gotmax]

You need to also install compilers and your kernel's headers package to build the driver. The quick way to do this is to install module-assistant and run as root or with sudo:

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m-a prepare

If your driver builds had actually succeeded, you would have seen a message about the nouveau driver being blacklisted, and advising a reboot as the easiest way to proceed. Since you didn't mention that, I assume the builds failed. The missing headers/compilers are the most common reason for that.

I didn't run MA-prepare, but I did get a pop up about the drivers conflicting with nouveau and having to reboot. Also, will bumblebee support multiple displays.

I saw something about bumblebee not handling it well on their github, but I didn't get the chance to read through all of it. My external display wasn't recognized (on Solus it worked fine) as I explained, but that could be because bumblebee wasn't configured correctly or because thunderbolt in general isn't configured right.

Isn't there another solution where turning off the discrete gpu requires a reboot? It's called primus-switch or something, right? Does that make more sense? What are your thoughts?

Thanks a ton.