Posted inInformation Technology

Fedora 33 Black Screen Again

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek3
black screen image

Fedora and Nvidia. We can one day hope Fedora actually tests with Nvidia at some point in the future. For RPM based distros I just don’t hold out hope.

Few things piss me off more than being notified I need to apply updates only to find a busted system on reboot. Fedora is notorious for this. RPM based distros in general have this “never test it” problem, especially when it comes to NVIDIA. They always try to point the finger at NVIDIA and it is always the distro’s fault.

I have multiple machines running Manjaro, an ARCH based distro that have no problems. ARCH is far more bleeding edge than RPM. The difference is these distros actually bother to test, at least from a compile and install standpoint.

This is almost as bad as the Fedora 32 problem. For the purposes of this article we will assume you had the Fedora 32 problem and now have your NVidia 450 driver in your Downloads directory.

First thing you have to is hit <Alt><Ctrl><F2>. This will change you to a terminal login screen where you can actually login. Yes child, the mouse is now an ornament.

You hope that even though you installed your NVIDIA driver via DKMS that was supposed to build it every upgrade somehow that step just got missed. You CD to Downloads and ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-450.66.run (using whatever filename you actually have of course.) You answer a few questions and hope for the best.

NVIDIA build failure

This is something the much praised CI (continuous integration) development model should have caught. Pure and simple, this won’t compile.

Finding the Fedora and NVIDIA Solution

Keep in mind this is only a temporary solution. The Fedora team will break this again.

I will save you a lot of trouble. You can find the 460 driver here. Click on the “Supported Products” tab and make sure your card is on it, then download it.

Now, that statement assumes you will be downloading from another machine. You could be “old school” and install one of these terminal browsers. Really disappointed with that list. I have an upcoming book on Emacs for my geek book series and it covers the Emacs Web browser.

So, we will assume you are either fortunate enough to have a friend or smart enough to have another machine handy. You download the new driver, copy it to a thumb drive, then what? The GUI always handled that mounting thing for you.

Kingston Data Traveler

I’ve used that old silver stick enough to know that it is a Kingston Data Traveler. The GUI is not going to auto-mount though, so we have to do a bit of digging.

fdisk -l output
sudo fdisk -l

That is the letter lowercase l and not the digit one. Don’t get lured into a mistake with this output. The physical device is /dev/sdc. The partition we are going to mount is /dev/sdc1. Your device and partition may well be different.

Next we have to make a place to mount this device. Mount it. Then copy the file to our Downloads directory so we can run it and have it on the target machine.

sudo mkdir /media/usb_1
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/usb_1
cd /media/usb_1
cp NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-460.32.03.run ~/Downloads

Running it is much like running the previous 450 documented in this post. Once it builds and installs successfully you have one final command.

sudo reboot now

Fedora 33 will now work until the next untested update.

Related posts:

How to Install PostgreSQL on Fedora 33

Fedora 32 – Black Screen After Login

Linux Distros That Suck at Multiple Hard Drives

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.