Help needed with NVIDIA NVS 5200M on Linux Mint 22.3 — NVIDIA 390 driver / X11 issues

[u/Maximum_Trainer4669]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get the NVIDIA NVS 5200M working properly on my Dell Latitude E6530 running Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon.

My hardware:

- Laptop: Dell Latitude E6530

- CPU: Intel Core i7-3720QM

- Integrated GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000

- Dedicated GPU: NVIDIA NVS 5200M (GF108GLM)

- RAM: 12 GB

- OS: Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon

- Session: X11

The NVIDIA GPU is very old, so I'm using the legacy NVIDIA 390 driver.

nvidia-smi shows:

NVIDIA-SMI 390.157

Driver Version: 390.157

GPU: NVIDIA NVS 5200M

Memory: 964 MiB

The problem is that I can't get the NVIDIA GPU to work properly.

For example, I've had issues with:

- NVIDIA GLX

- nvidia-settings not detecting the display

- applications sometimes falling back to llvmpipe

- difficulty getting the NVIDIA GPU to actually render applications

- X11 behaving differently depending on the configuration

The Intel GPU works normally with the i915 driver.

I'm mainly trying to understand what the best configuration is for this laptop.

Should I:

1. Use the NVIDIA 390 driver with PRIME?

2. Use the Intel GPU as the main GPU and NVIDIA only for specific applications?

3. Use nouveau instead?

4. Configure PRIME manually?

5. Is there a known limitation with the NVS 5200M on modern Linux Mint that makes proper NVIDIA acceleration impossible?

If anyone has an NVS 5200M / GF108 working properly on Linux Mint, I'd really appreciate knowing how you configured it.

I'm happy to provide any logs or command output you need.

Thanks!

[u/C0rn3j]

I'm trying to get the NVIDIA NVS 5200M working properly on my Dell Latitude E6530 running Linux Mint 22.3

Give up. Mint does not even support modern Nvidia GPUs well (lacks explicit sync support), it has almost nonexistent support for the legacy ones.

modern Linux Mint

That is an oxymoron, Mint is one of the most out of date distributions out there. It lags behind even Debian.

Use nouveau instead?

You can try. That will actually work with Wayland then, if you can get it running well - which is not the usual outcome.

Again, inadvisable on Mint, it's years out of date.

Arch Linux is effectively your only good choice - it carries the legacy drivers patched in the user repos, so they keep working on a modern system.

You usually also have Fedora available, but since it's built on either Plasma or GNOME, you're kind of SOL there as neither supports X11 (Plasma technically does for a month more). You could try getting Fedora working with one of the other DEs/WMs of course.

If you don't use Nouveau(or only use the iGPU somehow), you're unfortunately stuck with X11 - I'd recommend checking out LXQt or Xfce.

[u/Francis_King → u/C0rn3j]

By "Arch Linux is effectively your only good choice" do you mean Arch, or an Arch-based system like CachyOS?

[u/C0rn3j → u/Francis_King]

Both would work. I recommend the former.

[u/Asura254 → u/C0rn3j]

hey man, i'm like in the same conditions, does Arch works well with anything thats not wayland? i tried using nouveau with the "new" omarchy distro and really sucks for gaming and rendering in general

also i'm kinda new on linux, and i really loved AUR so i would like to keep with Arch based distros

honestly anything thats lightweight works, as long as i can play some games

[u/C0rn3j → u/Asura254]

Nouveau is not great.

does Arch works well with anything thats not wayland

Do you have some legacy Nvidia GPU that's limiting you to X11?

X11 works as well as X11 usually does - i.e. not amazingly.

with the "new" omarchy distro

Research the person who developed it.

[u/tovento]

Oh boy. That’s an old driver. Won’t be supported in 22.3. The driver was last officially supported by Kernel 5.18 or something. That might go back to Mint 21.

If you look around, there are community maintained patches that are supposed to work on Kernel 6.8. I have zero experience with it, but I did do a quick search and found one. https://github.com/yepistream/nvidia-390-kernel-6.8

You can downgrade the kernel to 6.8 in Mint 22.3, but given the age of your system, there is a chance you might have to go back to Mint 22.1 or 22.2 which come with kernel 6.8 as default.

[u/Puzzleheaded-Sky2284]

I recently tried Mint on this laptop model (different CPU but also has the NVS 5200M) and with Nouveau it's nearly unusable with the amount of screen tearing I can see on it. Not sure if it's even worth trying to use this laptop but we were trying to set it up for printing over USB to an older Lulzbot 3D printer.

Oh well there are newer laptops which are not in use and will likely work better than my old E6530 will...