Installing Fedora on notebook with nVida GeForce graphic card

[UK2]

Hello,

I am planning to buy a

ASUS UX303LN

in the next few days and install Fedora 21.

However, I am concerned about the hardware drivers. The Asus comes with the following graphic card.

nVidia GeForce 840M (2GB GDDR3)

The Asus only comes with Widows 8.1 pre-installed and there is no Linux version. I haven't used windows for the last 8 years, and don't intend to go back to it.

Fedora is the OS of choice for me and I have been using it for the last 8 years on all my notebook. However, this will be the first one with a discrete graphic card. Just worried about the driver situation.

Does anyone have any previous experience installing nVidia graphics cards a Asus notebook?

Many thanks for any suggestions,

[wintonian]

If the opensource nouveau driver doesn't work for you have a look here for Nvidia drivers. If you want/ need to get down and dirty with them then the Nvida documentation might help.

The rest of the hardware should work out the box - of course there are now and again exceptions .

[Ahmad Samir]

I don't know if the open-source nouveau driver supports that chip (yet) or not, but lately I personally haven't had much luck with the nouveau driver...

The latest nvidia drivers in the rpmfusion repos for F21 is 343.22 which according to its official page at nvidia.com supports the GeForce 840M graphics chip.

To install the nvidia proprietary driver from the rpmfusion repos follow this guide: http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia

[UK2]

Hello,

I have installed Fedora 21 on my notebook. I haven't installed any additional drivers. However, when I lspci I have the following:
03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 840M] (rev a2)

I haven't installed any additional drivers (just a clean install of fedora 21) and wondering as I can detect the Nvidia card. Does this mean its working? Is there anything I can do to test this?

Many thanks for any additional information

[ozjd]

If you can run the applications that you want then it must be working for you. My experience with a few nvidia chips is that they mostly work okay with the default drivers although I've reports that the very latest ones tend to be more problematic. You only need the proprietary drivers if you are doing things like playing games.

Most desktops will tell you if they have a problem. I know mate and cinnamon do this on startup. KDE will do it if you try to change the desktop effects and it can't activate them.

[Ahmad Samir]

As has been posted, by the default the system will use the nouveau driver for nvidia cards, and it seems to be working on your system. To confirm look at the output of 'lspci -k' it should print the "driver in use:" for the card(s).

[UK2]

Hi,

I did the following command and this was the output:

03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 840M] (rev a2)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 167d
	Kernel modules: nouveau

Does this look like it is working ok?

[mikee]

To test graphics, you first need to go into one of the desktop environments.
If you can get in ok, I think running one of teh Unigine graphics programs like Heaven or Valley would give you a good
idea how well it's working.

[Ahmad Samir]

Originally Posted by UK2

Hi,

I did the following command and this was the output:

03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 840M] (rev a2)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 167d
	Kernel modules: nouveau

Does this look like it is working ok?

Yes, that indicates the nouveau driver is being used, as expected.

[madi2000]

Hey.

I got UX303LN, jus few days ago.

Fedora 22 - installed from flash drive - (amazing install time ... SSD target drive and USB 3.0 flash as souce.... amazing!)

All work's out of box for me, except screen light button's (volume buttons work ok). I did not have any time to look into this problem yet, but everything else (even some steam games) works beautifully.

[rgaelzer]

You can take a look here:
http://www.forums.fedoraforum.org/sh...d.php?t=137531
and search within the thread for testimonies of other installations in ASUS laps. Seems that your particular model has no entry yet, but there are several other ASUS boxes mentioned. Perhaps some of them will have a similar hardware as yours.

Regarding your nVidia discrete card, if you ever want to take full advantage of its capabilities and install nVidia's driver, do NOT try to install the drivers provided by RPMFusion. It's very likely that your card uses the new Optimus technology and the standard drivers won't work in this case.
Instead, you should follow the instructions given by the Bumblebee project:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee

I had a recent experience with my new GSI laptop, where I finally got the GeForce GTX 870M card working. Perhaps my testimony can be of some help, should you ever try to implement bumblebee:
http://www.forums.fedoraforum.org/sh...&postcount=507

[UndiscoveredBum]

I would recommend getting the proprietary versions of the NVidia drivers on your computer over the Nouveau drivers, personally.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...eau_2014&num=2

This is a list of benchmarking done at the start of 2015. The video cards used aren't the one you have, but you can find more benchmarking comparisons that almost always result the same way this report does.