After some serious problems on my test system with plasma-workspace 5.15.x and nouveau (to be described in a separate article..) I had to contemplate moving back to the proprietary nvidia driver, but found – of course – that older cards were not supported by the ‘latest’ drivers.

I did find that at least one of the older drivers – 390.116 – could be patched to work with kernel 5.1, using the fix originally developed for driver 418.56 ( http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2533 and http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2530 ) and compiled OK:

…………………………
ld -r -o /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-modeset/nv-modeset-interface.o /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-modeset/nvidia-modeset-linux.o
Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST 4 modules
CC /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-drm.mod.o
LD [M] /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-drm.ko
CC /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-modeset.mod.o
LD [M] /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-modeset.ko
CC /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-uvm.mod.o
LD [M] /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia-uvm.ko
CC /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia.mod.o
LD [M] /home/rgadsdon/kernel/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.116/kernel/nvidia.ko
make[2]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-5.1'
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-5.1'

Unfortunately, this driver was still too ‘new’ for my old GX9800 card, so off to eBay for an inexpensive currently-supported replacement!

Robert Gadsdon. May 17, 2019.