[GTALUG] war story: Fedora 35 and Nvidia GTX 650

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I've been using a GTX 650 on my desktop for over seven years.

This may surprise you since I am an open-source fan.  The reason I
chose it is that it was all I had that would drive my UltraHD TV at
full resolution.  Things are better now (not as much as one would
like) but I'm still using the same setup.

The open source Nouveau driver isn't up to the job.  It wouldn't drive
the monitor seven years ago.  I try it every few years but it never
does the job I need.  Currently it seems to be OK until I start my
million-tab Firefox session.

I upgraded from Fedora 34 to 35, using the in-place dnf method.
	<https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/>

After that, the nvidia driver would not run.  I thrashed about for a 
considerable amount of time and I cannot explain what happened, but I got 
it working.  Here are some of the things I found useful.

I used the RPM Fusion repository for the drivers.  (Red Hat doesn't 
distribute closed source drivers.)  This document is useful:
	<https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Legacy_GeForce_600.2F700>

When nvidia drivers fail to load, the log is not at all helpful.  (One
reason can be that the firmware has Secure Boot enabled, but that was
not my problem.)

Nvidia considers my card "legacy" so the mainstream drivers 
no longer support it.  The RPM Fusion drivers for Fedora 34 and earlier 
did but not for Fedora 35.  Basically, I have to switch to the 
nvidia-470xx series of drivers.

Hint: I think you only want one generation of nvidia driver installed on a 
machine (I could be wrong).  If you are changing generations, rip the 
former ones out before installing the new ones.

In the Fedora 34 time frame, something else when wrong (see an earlier war 
story) so I created a new F34 installation that shared the /home partition 
with my old one.  I had two root partitions, one for the old F34 and 
another for the fresh F34.  This was handy when I was experimenting with 
this problem.  But it exposed my ignorance of grub2 in Fedora.

I always thought that you could fix the grub configuration by
	sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
Not so since Fedora 34.  Read this:
	<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2>
(It even covers the case where you have screwed it up like I did.)