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I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ N̶V̶I̶D̶I̶A̶ O̶p̶t̶i̶m̶u̶s̶ a̶n̶d̶ I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶n̶’t̶ b̶e̶e̶n̶ a̶b̶l̶e̶ t̶o̶ g̶e̶t̶ a̶n̶y̶ m̶e̶t̶h̶o̶d̶ o̶f̶ i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ N̶V̶I̶D̶I̶A̶ d̶r̶i̶v̶e̶r̶s̶ t̶o̶ w̶o̶r̶k̶. I̶ d̶o̶n̶’t̶ n̶e̶c̶e̶s̶s̶a̶r̶i̶l̶y̶ c̶a̶r̶e̶ a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ t̶h̶e̶ f̶u̶l̶l̶ s̶w̶i̶t̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ a̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ o̶f̶ t̶h̶e̶ O̶p̶t̶i̶m̶u̶s̶, a̶l̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ s̶u̶r̶e̶ i̶t̶ w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ b̶e̶ n̶i̶c̶e̶. I̶ a̶l̶s̶o̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ b̶e̶e̶n̶ u̶n̶s̶u̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶f̶u̶l̶ t̶u̶r̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ o̶f̶f̶ t̶h̶e̶ I̶n̶t̶e̶l̶ U̶H̶D̶ g̶r̶a̶p̶h̶i̶c̶s̶ (̶a̶s̶ a̶n̶ o̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶)̶. M̶y̶ c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶ i̶s̶ a̶n̶ M̶S̶I̶ S̶w̶o̶r̶d̶ 1̶5̶ A̶1̶1̶U̶D̶, w̶i̶t̶h̶ N̶V̶I̶D̶I̶A̶ C̶o̶r̶p̶o̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ G̶A̶1̶0̶7̶M̶ [̶G̶e̶F̶o̶r̶c̶e̶ R̶T̶X̶ 3̶0̶5̶0̶ T̶i̶ M̶o̶b̶i̶l̶e̶]̶ 3̶D̶ g̶r̶a̶p̶h̶i̶c̶s̶. I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶h̶e̶ D̶r̶i̶v̶e̶r̶ M̶a̶n̶a̶g̶e̶r̶ i̶n̶ M̶i̶n̶t̶, a̶n̶d̶ a̶l̶s̶o̶ m̶a̶n̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶. I̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ c̶h̶e̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ a̶n̶d̶ I̶ a̶m̶ u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶h̶e̶ 5̶5̶0̶ d̶r̶i̶v̶e̶r̶, w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ I̶ t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ i̶s̶ s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶s̶e̶d̶ t̶o̶ b̶e̶ t̶h̶e̶ r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ o̶n̶e̶.
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I am having trouble transitioning to Linux where I am not able to simply navigate to additional hard drives contained in my laptop or attached via usb. I have my torrents on an external drive, and it keeps getting renamed, easystore somehow became “owned” by root and inaccessible, and I had to switch to easystore1 which was created in the same folder. After I switched, easystore1 became owned by root, and I had to switch to easystore2, which had been created.
In addition to this, I can’t browse to the external hard drive through plex media server or radarr/sonarr, it just doesn’t show on the menu. I know it’s a permission issue, but I don’t understand how that works.
I was happy up to a point, but my Linux installation is becoming what I was afraid of, a test showing me how little I know, and a time-eater that causes my wife to wonder what happened to her husband.
Please, I want to be free, but I don’t want to just say bye to my hard drives and my GPU. Help me, community. You’re my only hope.
For what it’s worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.
You could try the booting the live CD and see if you’re able to get the graphics working more easily. And I’ve never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what’s up there.
I’m not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.
I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.
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You’re not the first person to not be able to make nvidia work on Mint. Here’s another one I found earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl6OBIQl_MI
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Use gparted to assign label names to your partitions/drives, and you might need to edit /etc/fstab. More info here, and there are more such forum posts to read through: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=344652
Overall, I’d say that Mint is the best distro to start with, but if you stumble on the few bugs they have, start looking elsewhere. I’d suggest you start by trying ubuntu 24.10 instead of mint.
Thanks for the info and the feeling of not being alone 😄
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1. I just installed Linux Mint myself, coming from Nobara and I also had some issues with my NVIDIA GPU, as I also have a laptop with an integrated GPU (AMD) and a dedicated GPU (GeForce 3070ti). The issue was “Secure boot” being enabled in BIOS. It would somehow block the NVIDIA driver from initiating correctly.
If you look in the “NVIDIA settings” app and it look like this:
It means the NVIDIA driver haven’t initiated correctly. See if “Secure boot” is enabled. Disable it.
2. What about the app “Disks”? Doesn’t that do what you need?
This turned out to be key, along with another comment. I went BACK to my BIOS and sure enough, with all the changes I had left secure boot enabled. Disabled it and everything went so smoothly I felt a little embarrassed.
Thanks friend!
I turned secure boot off a while ago but I did update the BIOS which involved resetting to default and I should check that, thanks.
I’ll try disks, but I think the problem is NTFS formatting. Which sucks, but it’s understandable.
If you want stability and ease of use similar to Windows, I highly recommend Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite or Bazzite. Optimus is working (now, asus gfxctl was broken for two weeks due to a new kernel) every keyboard shortcut is working, and, for some unknown miracle, battery life is better than windows. I’m on a G14.
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You say you haven’t been able to install Nvidia drivers, but then say you are using 550 drivers. Are you saying you can’t run any games or programs that engage your GPU? Open and terminal and run
nvidia-smiand see what the output is. -
What is the filesystem on these drives? If it’s NTFS, they will be mounted as read-only by default and show as owned by root. This is by design to prevent potential damage to NTFS filesystems which are technically a Windows-only thing. You do have the option of changing this behavior, but it will inevitably cause problems because the open driver to run these filesystems on Linux still runs into some MS proprietary filesystem issues. If you have the option of copying the files on each drive to your local drive, reformatting the externals into another more friendly filesystem, then copying the files back, you’ll be in a much better place. I would suggest exFat to make things simplest for you, since it sounds like you may be plugging those drivers into other Windows machines, potentially.
- I have successfully “installed” them but when I’ve run nvidia-smi it says they aren’t loaded. Nvidia Prime applet says ERR.
- Yes they’re NTFS. The computer is using fuse to access it. It seems the root permission things is linked to installing video drivers. Every time I do it it changes the “home” drive and the “root” drives.
I’m pretty sure you’ve got a race condition with the Nouveau driver getting loaded first then. That’s the open source Nvidia driver in the stock kernels. Run
lsmod | grep nouveauto confirm (if you get lines returned, then it’s loaded.You can sidestep this by blacklisting it and giving the installed Nvidia driver a chance to load first. Instructions here (use the Ubuntu section)
Reboot, and then you should be good to go. If
nvidia-smistill doesn’t show the correct output, you may need to just reinstall the driver packages again.Seems like a promising answer, I wonder why someone downvoted it. I wish they’d left a comment.
I’ll def explore it
Well that’s exactly what the issue is, so there’s your solution. Easy to confirm with one command.
Working. I had reset my BIOS and “safe boot” was back on. Turned it off, reinstalled the driver from “Driver Manager”, Used your commands and followed your instructions and found that the Nvidia driver was working. Opened Nvidia X server settings and it looked the way it should. nvidia-smi showed the whole shebang.
I knew you guys could help me. I could cry.
Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren’t working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you’re getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don’t format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.
Shoot. I got a lot of stuff on that drive.
I thought about pop OS but I don’t like that it’s owned by some corporation or something. And I thought about Manjaro but it’s Arch Linux and I don’t even want to open that can of worms. I’m having enough trouble in debian, with tons of tutorials and help.
I have used the software manager to install the drivers (didn’t work and the computer froze at login) but it was after a Timeshift not a fresh install. I’d hate to do that now just to find it still didn’t work.
Pop OS is excellent. You wouldn’t really know it’s created by a corporation. It’s basically just the build they run on their hardware but I’ve not seen anything in it like ads or anything limiting my freedom. My perception of it is that it’s just a more friendly and (snap-free) Ubuntu and I concur with those saying Nvidia is smoother on it. It does have a modified gnome but coming in the near future is their own DE called cosmic which seems promising. If it ends up being bad I will probably just switch to fedora even though Debian based distros are more supported. Been loving fedora on my new laptop
That’s very fair. I say this only because I’ve found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default. Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it’s arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it’s automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn’t work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It’s not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes. Arch doesn’t have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly. I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy. Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses. Anyway, I do hope you’re able to get mint working for you.
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I’m pretty new as well. Try looking at mounting your hard drives with /etc/fstab. You should try to mount them via UUID and put them in the /mnt folder. I’m using mint cinnamon your mileage might vary. https://wiki.debian.org/fstab
As for the integrated graphics, you might be able to disable them in BIOS.
As for the video drivers I had a lot of trouble as well and ended up having to uninstall a lot of drivers manually to get the right version to stick.
Can’t disable in BIOS, I even updated my BIOS hoping the new one would have that capability, but no joy.
Yes, video drivers got me using Timeshift a LOT.
I don’t understand why Mint is chosen by people.
Distro hopped for years and got to a point I just wanted to use an OS and not screw around with it. I also didn’t want to spend time troubleshooting odd problems. Mint’s been installed on my machines for years and it almost always works flawlessly. Family members have far more problems with Windows.
I absolutely agree. I use it at home for lots of different tasks and put it on my parents laptops as well. It might not be the hottest, most modern disto for the cool kids but it’s a great experience.
It just works for 99.99% of anything a regular user would want it to and is generally very easy to manage and update without a command line. I moved my parents who are non-technical and in their 70’s over to it from Windows 10. They like it so much they had me install it on their laptop as well.
A have never used mint and only used debian as a Workstation. If there is a permissions issue with an application, my first thought is how you installed you application?
When you say, you cant easily get tonthe content of a drive, what Desktop Environment do you us3 and what file explorer?
I installed Linux Mint from a live USB. I have installed applications via bash, software manager, and some even from the snap store.
I’m not sure what desktop environment Mint uses, I’m pretty sure it’s not KDE, and I have no clue about which explorer.
Mint’s default desktop is Cinnamon. The default file manager is Nemo.
If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven’t changed it that would be what you are using.
Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn’t always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I’ve never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.
