GUIDE: Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon with Nvidia GPU(s)

[Howdy]

Tried it and initially failed, did some other sudo stuff and failed, did some more stuff and failed attempted one last time annnnnnnnnnnddddddddd

FINALLY IT WORKED!!!!!!!!

I do not know which stuff made it work but I AM NOT touching it!!!! It is running and that's fine with me.
So there are a few more points coming in from my machines.

 

[biodoc]

Tried it and initially failed, did some other sudo stuff and failed, did some more stuff and failed attempted one last time annnnnnnnnnnddddddddd

FINALLY IT WORKED!!!!!!!!

I do not know which stuff made it work but I AM NOT touching it!!!! It is running and that's fine with me.
So there are a few more points coming in from my machines.

That's great! Congrats!

 

[biodoc]

The linux mint installation guide has some useful information.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Nice link!

 

[crashtech]

So... 1 down, 9 to go. Mint 18.3 is running on one of my 3930K machines with a 1060. Thanks to everyone who contributed valuable information in this thread. Both BOINC and F@H seem to be humming along nicely, with only one remaining snag that I can see:

This particular machine needs to be located away from wired Ethernet, and has a USB wireless adapter that has a slight case of narcolepsy. In Windows, it's easy enough to find where to configure power management and simply uncheck a box that will prevent the adapter from sleeping. In Linux, I'm lost when it comes to this. I don't think the GUI incorporates any means of controlling wifi adapters aside from joining a network. Right now, the fix is to physically yank the adapter out and plug it back in, something that won't always be possible.

 

[biodoc]

So... 1 down, 9 to go. Mint 18.3 is running on one of my 3930K machines with a 1060. Thanks to everyone who contributed valuable information in this thread. Both BOINC and F@H seem to be humming along nicely, with only one remaining snag that I can see:

This particular machine needs to be located away from wired Ethernet, and has a USB wireless adapter that has a slight case of narcolepsy. In Windows, it's easy enough to find where to configure power management and simply uncheck a box that will prevent the adapter from sleeping. In Linux, I'm lost when it comes to this. I don't think the GUI incorporates any means of controlling wifi adapters aside from joining a network. Right now, the fix is to physically yank the adapter out and plug it back in, something that won't always be possible.

I don't have wireless adapters on my linux machines but after some google searches, I found a potential solution.

In a terminal run:

iwconfig

If you see a line (like below) for power management for your wireless adapter and it is on, then you need to turn it off.

Power Management: on


To turn off wireless power management follow these instructions (Source):

Open this file with your text editor, let's use nano for example:

sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

By default there is

wifi.powersave = 3

Just change it to a value of 2.

The change will be active upon the next reboot.

The values for the powersave field are:

NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DEFAULT (0): use the default value
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_IGNORE (1): don't touch existing setting
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_DISABLE (2): disable powersave
NM_SETTING_WIRELESS_POWERSAVE_ENABLE (3): enable powersave

After rebooting check to see if power management for the wireless adapter is off:

run in a terminal:
iwconfig

Hopefully you will see:

Power Management: off

 

[crashtech]

Thanks, @biodoc , I believe that has fixed it! Now I may just make a modified disk image of this install for some of the other Nvidia machines and see how it goes.

 

[crashtech]

I hope no one will mind if I drop this bit of wisdom from Stefan here:

...But besides psensor, I also use something like

nvidia-smi dmon -d 120​

in a console window. This shows power usage, temperature, core utilization, memory utilization, and clocks, every 120 seconds. See "nvidia-smi -h" and "nvidia-smi dmon -h" for more options.

(BTW, one of the first extra packages which I installed on Mint was Openssh-server. That way I can use an ssh client on my main PC to log into a command line on a DC worker PC, for example to run tools like nvidia-smi remotely.)

 

[crashtech]

So far, my Linux box has been the least reliable of all ten of my machines. I'm not blaming the OS but rather my unfamiliarity with the it. I can find the error logs, but so far have not learned enough to interpret them. Nothing stands out, but at some point last night, it crashed to a black screen that wasn't just a failure of the UI, as it wasn't making any heat either.

 

[StefanR5R]

Do you have any 3rd party kernel drivers on it besides nvidia?
(Best to avoid any out-of-the-mainline kernel drivers on machines on which reliability is desired.)

 

[crashtech]

Do you have any 3rd party kernel drivers on it besides nvidia?
(Best to avoid any out-of-the-mainline kernel drivers on machines on which reliability is desired.)

No, I don't think so. At this point it looks like it's all my fault, I didn't want to accept running the GPU at stock when it OCed flawlessly under Windows. But it just doesn't want to work, probably because I haven't figured out how to increase the voltage under Linux. So far, leaving the card at bone stock clocks (about 1897) seems to settle things down. It's been up for 20 hours now without rebooting. I need to find and edit the config file that is setting the GPU clock at +110 upon reboot, just did not have time over the weekend.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Should be in your home folder, ICON should be on the desktop if you didn't delete it. Fancontrols was the suggested name. It's just a text file, so double click to open, edit, and save. Next reboot should load up the edited file.

 

[biodoc]

I think voltage control only works for fermi and maxwell GPUs. If you have an pascal GPU then I think we are out of luck.

If you have coolbits set to 28 then you can test it by running the following command.

nvidia-settings -q GPUCurrentCoreVoltage

If you get nothing then voltage control is not an option.

On my rig with 2 x 1080s with coolbits set to 28, I can control fan speed and overclocking but voltage control is not an option.

 

[crashtech]

@biodoc , the command returns a blank line, so stock clocks it is. Actually, it doesn't seem to mind being set to "Prefer Maximum Performance," which gives it a very slight boost. I'll have to see if there is a way to make that persistent between reboots, but actually I don't see it needing rebooting very often now.

 

[crashtech]

A little OT, but I'll be wanting to convert some AMD systems over to Mint as well. There is some information out there on doing this, but I would probably want to participate in a thread of our own on the subject. Problem is, I don't feel qualified enough to even author the thread. Any volunteers?

 

[TennesseeTony]

I'm going to have to give it a try (AMD cards in Linux), TODAY. So....I'll let you know if anything happens worth hearing about.

 

[biodoc]

My experience with AMD cards in linux is ancient history but you may find this guide helpful.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Nice, thanks Doc! And it's almost written in English, which I understand best.

 

[StefanR5R]

From what I vaguely recall from articles, you need to go from your card model, figure out if you need catalyst or (less likely) radeon or (recently) amdgpu as a driver in order to have working GPGPU on that card, then find a convenient kernel version/ distribution in order to get that driver with the least amount of pain. And it's all in flux, with the older drivers dropping out of distributor support or/and losing features, while the newer driver is slow to gain the distributor support and features that everybody wants...

 

[TennesseeTony]

I dropped an AMD card in ONE system so far, mind you this was a system that was setup for a Nvidia GTX1080. The display/desktop looks normal, clear picture, all that, but the text..... Names/titles/file names have at best, been shortened, or at worst completely mispelled. I was expecting it to revert to some sort of 'standard VGA' driver, but it appears not to have done so.

I took a 'short nap' of about 5 hours, lol, so I didn't get much further than that. I've decided to just run out the already downloaded WCG tasks, then do some disk cloning (for an easier time once I regain some Nvidia cards after the bubble bursts), and try reinstalling Mint from scratch after that.

Tips on Linux drive cloning please (mostly, which program [free] to use)? M2 drives, so unable[unwilling] to remove them and put into my Windows system...

 

[StefanR5R]

A primitive way to do it is with dd. Make sure to enter the right device numbers. Devices are renumbered when you boot with more or fewer devices plugged in.

If the target is smaller than the source, use e.g. gparted to shrink the source before copying with dd. If the target is bigger than the source, expand the desired filesystem on the target after copying.

 

[crashtech]

Parted Magic is a nice live distro that has Clonezilla in it, which is supposed to be faster and more capable than dd. Clonezilla is available lots of other ways, too, but Parted Magic is very handy, it's the Swiss Army Knife of live Linux distros.

 

[TennesseeTony]

I ended up using CloneZilla, but it was hard to do, that particular GPU really seems to hate the generic Linux Driver, as the screen image is interlaced, and jittery, not only on the Mint installation, but two separate Live distros as well.

 

[crashtech]

My efforts to get an HD 7990 working in Mint 18.3 have so far been unsuccessful. The open source driver runs the GUI okay, but I can't get OpenCL to work yet. The proprietary driver excludes support for Tahiti (and Malta).

 

[Howdy]

How often should Linux be "updated" through the "update manager"......every new update? occasionally? forgetaboutit?