Can I boot from the Clear Linux* OS Desktop ISO with safe graphics?

Q&A
1

I have burned a Clear Linux Live Desktop ISO image to DVD.

If I boot from here and don’t do anything else I get a garbled screen on account of my Nvidia graphics card. My monitor is hooked up via HDMI to the graphics card.

In this thread (Installer fails on AMD Epyc with Nvidia GPU - #4 by puneetse) there is a hint that I can press “e” and add “modprobe.blacklist=nouveau” to the boot command line. And, yes!, that does indeed work. That will then allow me to install CLR Linux. But then when I boot in to that OS installation, same issue, the screen contents is all garbled up.

There is this tutorial (https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/tutorials/nvidia.html), but a prerequisite there is “A Clear Linux OS system with a desktop installed”. So I decided to do some web browsing.

Then I found a Kubuntu install (from www.kubuntu.org). When that ISO image boots the first two options are “Start Kubuntu” and “Start Kubuntu (safe graphics)”.

So is there anything similar for the Clear Linux Live Desktop? (a ‘safe graphics’ option I mean).

2

Your hardware does not work with nouveau and you can boot your installed installation with the same boot commandline option as the image to disable the nouveau driver and boot to a text console. Just interrupt the bootloader and add the modprobe line again. (You can make this permanent - instructions are in man clr-boot-manager.)

You can then attempt to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers as explain elsewhere on this forum.

You have the desktop installed, so you meet the requirements for the NVIDIA installation tutorial already - you don’t need to install anything else. ClearLinux allows you to install the desktop and remove it - it still is ClearLinux.